Driving Around Town On Christmas Day

 Yesterday Raps spoke to me about writing something about the modern secularization of Christmas. Oh, what a multi-faceted subject.  It's going to be hard for me to solidify some remarks on the subject.

Of course I understood the premise of the holiday.  I knew that it was officially a religous memorial of the birth of Jesus, Yeshua...name means salvation, bye the way, the Messiah.  I believed in him wholeheartedly, but was not raised in any church.  There are reasons for that.  When my father left Idaho and his family church, uncle was the pastor, he was rebelling against what he saw as close-minded ignorance..but he also continued to disapprove of other churches, just like his family at home did.  We fell through the cracks, churchwise.  But he did acquaint us with the Bible by reading it aloud.

My mother's father was a Jew, but had been converted to mormonism by his own father who, I think, let the mormons move him from Switzerland, and let it go at that.  Shameful.  Shameful. But you don't get to just stop being a Jew.  It doesn't work like that.  Culturally he still was, even though a farmer in Idaho.  He could speak some Yiddish. Anyhow, my mother was nuts for Christmas.  There was tension around all holidays.

And yet, the whole phenomenon was alive.  There was a kind of sense of the set apart about this day and the days leading up to it.  Happenings were judged by their calendar relationship to Christmas.  A kind of silence or pause in the business of the world and life.  It was very intangible.  It was just another day.  But, still, a different type of a day.

I was always very interested, when I got older, in driving around on Christmas day to see the quiet streets.  Special. Nothing open. The whole world outside was quiet.  There was disappointment too.  The driving about was almost like a search for the reality that this day was meant to be.

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Raps is correct of course.  At this time in history the cultural practice of Christmas should be called Crassness.  So much ugliness. So much commercial jollity.  Endless repetition of soulless canned music in every business or office wearies the mind.  I think perhaps the enemy of our souls delights in making the words of faith into hollow claptrap that repels the honest person.

There is too much packaging and not enough gift!  That, in spite of the fact that spending on gifts seems to have metastasized into a money making machine for all of the commercial economy.

But, like everything else, in this train station that is our life here, we have the ultimate choice of what to make of Christmas.  If it is a holy day, we can make it holy.  Holy just means set apart.  Kept separate from the rest of life.  Indeed, special. 

All ways of honest celebration seem good to me.  If parties and gifts are good, then good. Church services are also.  It's what's in the heart and mind that counts always.  Or even just a quiet day of contemplation could be a perfectly lovely Christmas.

We don't have to let the world have Christmas.  They do it wrong anyhow.  Maybe this would be a good chance to demonstrate real holiness and happiness by example.

I hope this permutation is not a disappointment.

Three versions!  Take your pick, or have all three.