Christmas has always suffered from naysayers, and I confess that I was once one of those, declaring Christmas as overly commercial, trashy, exploiting our unceasing greed, and paying tribute to a self-serving approach to life. Yes, all that and more; Christmas was just a celebration of shopping. Fortunately, I now see a bigger picture, not that my earlier beliefs were wrong, but they did not reflect the whole. I should explain this further.

At the outset, the biggest obstacle for Christmas for me is its tie to Christianity, which does not serve it well. No, I do not mean that as a negative dig on religion, only that the thin thread no longer ties the two. There are those who still shout “Christ is the reason for the season”, “Put Christ back in Xmas”, etc., but for the majority, the words no longer apply. The universal acceptance of the story no longer exists, historians have proved the facts are questionable, and the event is no longer as important. The confusion that besets us is that we share warm memories of a time when we sensed the tie, such as when we attended a midnight church service on Christmas Eve. Our sense of reality and our emotional memories create a push and pull within our hearts, allowing us to attempt to satisfy both sides of Christmas, which serves us little.

Beyond that, even for those of us who struggle to spark the Christmas spirit, we see more smiles, hear more kind words, and see true community spirit appear where we had assumed none to exist. It is this experience that forces us to accept that the greed we see at Christmas does not prevent or overshadow the good we also see. To condemn Christmas is to miss the positive service it brings to us all. Whatever name we give to the occasion, we need this pause in our lives each year to find and renew the better part of us. Merry Christmas.