Christmas Prodding

May I offer a gentle Christmas prodding cleverly disguised as a blog? Floating around this amorphous collection of information we call the internet are chain emails and facebook wall posts encouraging Christians to “take back Christmas.” These messages encourage Christians to only patronize businesses that will say “Merry Christmas” as opposed to “Happy Holidays”or even worse, “Season’s Greetings”. Please allow me to gently push back against this trend for following reasons.

First, we act as if businesses and corporations actually have the ability to define what Christmas is. Why do Christians feel the need to “take back” Christmas? When was Christmas given to them in the first place? Wal-Mart, Target, and Costco are not the arbiters of truth. They are simply organizations out to make a buck. They figured out that people spend money at Christmas. Their goal is not to spread the truth of Christmas, but to get you to spend more money. That’s it. That is their nefarious agenda. They do not have the ability to define what Christmas is, nor can they halt you from celebrating it. If they think it is more profitable to say “Happy Holidays” than “Merry Christmas”, what does this matter to the Church? Regardless of their stance, you should be wise to the fact that they view you as a wallet with legs. How they want to entice you to spend money during this season does not affect the meaning of this holiday an iota. Some perspective would do wonders here. Our brothers and sisters in Africa don’t deal with this issue. They are too busy trying to stay alive in the midst of people who want to kill them for their faith. It’s a little bigger deal than a clerk saying “Happy Holidays”.

Second, one of the biggest complaints I have with our modern practice of celebrating Christmas is how materialistic it has become. Starting in October we receive catalog after catalog of stuff you can buy your kids. Seriously, I saw a TV ad for Christmas shopping in July this year. Christmas for the vast majority of Americans is about giving and getting stuff. This is a mockery of Christmas. Our God cries out to us and says that we can be saved through His Son. Our materialistic culture cries out to us and says that we can be saved by having the right stuff. Which message do you think we more readily receive? The reason some companies hold onto phrases like “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings” is that in years past they realized some people were offended by the words “Merry Christmas”. These people stopped buying their stuff. If people don’t buy their stuff, they don’t make money. So, they changed the words. It was primarily a business decision. Today, this business decision makes some Christians upset. Soon, many of these businesses will probably make the decision to change back. It has nothing to do with what they may or may not personally believe. It is all about profit. The irony is that by fighting to make businesses recognize “Christmas”, you are only fighting to make Christmas more of a consumeristic occasion. You are only providing a monetary incentive for businesses to mock the real reason of Christmas.

Third, is this the battle that we want to fight? Everyday hundreds of babies are legally killed. There is ethnic cleansing occurring all around the globe. Christians are killed every day for simply professing Christ. And we get in a huff about whether a clerk will say “Merry Christmas” to us. Where are our priorities? The energy expended on this issue could be channeled to much more productive causes…if only we cared as much about the important issues as we care about our nostalgic notions of what Christmas is “supposed to be.”

So tell that clerk “Merry Christmas”, but don’t think that you have helped to fulfill the Great Commission by doing so. Make your decisions about what stores you will or will not frequent, but think about the long term ramifications before you boycott a store for saying “Season’s Greetings”. Do you want people pretending that they give a darn about the birth of the Savior so that you will shop at their store? Don’t for a second think that a store advertising “Merry Christmas” is an indication that Christ is being honored in our culture as LORD. I offer two pieces of exhortation if you want to our culture to see Christmas differently. First, live your life like Christ makes a real difference to you. Second, tell the world around you about the truth of the infinite God who became an infant in order to save the world.