My Christmas tree is dead. We’re still 4 days from Christmas and the poor thing is just drooping and dry. It’s my fault really. I bought it at Publix where they don’t saw off the bottom for you, then was too lazy to pull out my hand saw and take a bit off the bottom. I watered it plenty, but the poor thing just wouldn’t drink. So it died. And it’s just sitting there, leaving needles on my floor, but leaving a nice scent in the meantime.
Well, it’s only four more days, right? Then I can just dump the tree. What’s four days anyways? Yeah, that’s one way of looking at it. Here’s the other. My tree is not an ADVENT tree. It is a CHRISTMAS tree. In other words I should have it up for Christmas. ALL of Christmas. Not just Christmas day. But the entire Christmas season. That, of course, traditionally ends on the feast of the Epiphany (what my Hispanic lineage refers to as “La Fiesta de los Reyes Magos”, or “Three Kings Day”). One of the things that I’ve noticed has been lost during this whole secularization and commercialization of Christmas is that people have not just forgotten the meaning of Christmas… they don’t even know when Christmas is. Everybody still seems to know that Hanukkah is nine days long. But nobody seems to know that Christmas is 12 days long. HELLO! That song is not about gifts!! There really are 12 days of Christmas. No, you’re not expected to give or receive gifts for 12 days (though it’d be nice), but we should be celebrating throughout that time.
And yet the Christmas trees will be out by the curb of most houses by Monday morning after Christmas (or taken straight to the dump). The decorations outside will have come down, and all the lights will have dimmed away long before the celebration should be over. It’s amazing how every year the decorations seem to go up earlier and earlier. It was my 7 year old that brought it up this year. It was shortly after Halloween when he noticed the first Christmas decorations up. “Shouldn’t those be Thanksgiving decorations?” he asked. The kids got a point. Everyone is SOOOOO ready to start celebrating Christmas, and yet when the celebration begins they leave early. What’s up with that?
It’s like telling everybody that you are going to have a party. The party will be from 8pm until midnight. At around three o’clock you leave to start preparing for the party. About an hour later, everybody starts showing up and celebrating without you there. At around 7 you get back to see everybody partying, so you rush inside to get dressed and prepped for your guests. You come out at 8 ready to join the party… YOUR party, but by 8:30 almost everybody is gone. They had celebrated enough, so they are ready to go… never having celebrated nor having celebrating with the host. In the end a couple of close friends will stick it out, and you will have a nice enough time, but you still lament not having had an opportunity to share with all those others invited. That’s what the Child Jesus must go through every year. Heck, it’s His party. But by the time He shows up everybody is gone! And nothing for Him… everybody came with gifts, but since He wasn’t around they gave them to each other and left. Out He comes to find no one there. Not exactly my idea of a party.
And so you see the signs around. Keep Christ in Christmas. It’s a select few who do this. They push the true agenda on others. We keep hearing Happy Holidays, but Merry Christmas? Not so much. My son had a “winter show”. The words Hanukkah and Kwanzaa were thrown around enough. The word Christmas was not mentioned. Not once. Pretty sad.
You know when one runs for miles like I do, you pass a lot of houses. My ten mile route goes in front of many, many houses. Many of them are adorned very extravagantly. Some of these houses are decorated beautifully. And yet, at looking at all these houses I saw ONE, just one house with a nativity in the front of the house. ONE!! Lots of Santas, lots of reindeer. I saw a bunch of Frostys. Some penguins (aren’t they in the South Pole?) Lots of Disney characters in Santa garb. Candy canes, icicles… one solitary Baby Jesus. WOW. It saddened me. Well, as it turns out these outdoor nativity scenes are as difficult to find in stores as in the houses I passed. It seems that stores don’t seem to want to sell them anymore. Afraid to lose money on selling the true meaning of Christmas? Shame on you then. These stores seem to be selling out instead of selling them out.
I was fortunate enough to find a few more nativity scenes though outside of my running route. One was miles away outside a house where I take my kids to see Santa every year. Loads of people show up to see jolly Saint Nick. But the owners of the house were quick to remind the people why they were there. Front and center at their house among all the other decorations is a huge nativity scene, with shepherds, and animals, and magi and all. (My son kept trying to climb on the donkey. I kept having to take him off). The other outdoor nativity sets I found were a bit farther out… like in Tampa. I went to visit a friend of mine there and we went to a small gathering of some of the families from his sons’ baseball teams. In one block I saw no less than four nativity scenes. It gave me a bit of hope that some were remembering why we were celebrating… even if I had to drive almost three hundred miles to find these people.
Now, I am not against the whole exchanging of gifts. I really do believe that this is the season of giving. God gave us a great gift by sending us his son so that we may have eternal life, and it is on Christmas that He sent Him. At the tail end of Christmas we remember the Magi who gave gifts to the boy king themselves. They presented gifts to a special child who was going mean a lot to a lot of people, then and in the future. Well, today we share gifts with our friends and children, and the way I see it it’s because they are gifts for us from our Lord and it’s a way of showing our gratitude for having them in our lives. We just can’t replace their importance in place of the true reason we are celebrating. What is the best way to “Remember the Reason for the Season”? Well, first is to remember that it is a season. And that it doesn’t end on Christmas Day. It begins that day. Before that is Advent… the preparation time. Well, the preparation is almost over. So let’s go out and celebrate. I’ve been hearing Christmas music on the radio now for over a month, and yet it’s not Christmas. And that music will end on the 25th. How about we keep the music going for another two weeks? Or maybe wishing Merry Christmas to others a full week into the New Year? These little gestures will maybe remind everyone of the significance of this holiday. Christmas is important because of what happened AFTER that day, not because of what LED to that day. I’ve heard it said that people wished that every day were Christmas. Well, now, we can say that we are celebrating two weeks like Christmas. Then maybe we can carry that Christmas spirit through the rest of the year.
Christmas is special because we don’t only end the year every year with Christmas, we begin every year in Christmas too. It’s a reminder to us of who and what God is. He is the Alpha and the Omega… the beginning and the end. We celebrate Christ as the year begins and send off the year with Christ on our minds also. Do people even know that New Year’s Day is the feast of Emmanuel? Emmanuel meaning “God is with us”? It is a holy day of obligation, and not because we are celebrating the New Year. But since it is the New Year, might as well bring God into a new beginning, right?… all the while remembering that God, after all, IS with us. Am I sounding preachy? Not my intention. I am just trying to vent a bit while bringing other things to light.
So, I get closer and closer to actually celebrating Christmas this year. Maybe this blog is for nobody but me. I need to remember what’s important this time of year, and writing about it will make me focus on this for a while. In fact, it’s made me focus on this topic for two days because half way through this blog, my wife decided she needed to confiscate the computer and I never got it back yesterday (this happened somewhere during the last paragraph). She, for once, read my blog. She said she liked it, and told me that I was funny (what, she hadn’t figured that out yet?) and insightful. She told me I write well too, but that I am wordy. OK, four out of five ain’t bad, right? Hopefully within my wordiness, I helped her see past all the distractions during this season and could smile about it’s importance. She’s told me before how much she dislikes Christmas… not the REAL Christmas, but what society has reduced it to… and it makes her sad. I totally understand. So, my goal this year is to keep it HAPPY. Let us rejoice the birth of our new king, our forever king. I hope that all who read this get that same little feeling out of this.
Oh and if I see you in the first few days of January, don’t be surprised if I am still wishing you a Merry Christmas. Or better yet, beat me to the punch and wish me one first. In the meantime, I hope you’re making the most of your ADVENT!
God bless you all!