Christmas

This post is a little late, I started it a while ago, and have been too lazy to finish it up until now.

I am often told that I am a bit of a grinch at Christmas time, but I don't think that it's true.  I really do like Christmas.  I think that it's a great time of year.  People are generally willing to think of others, which is nice and lots of people give away extra money in the form of gift cards for others in poor countries, which I really like as well.

I do have a few problems with the way that we do Christmas, though. 

The more that I think about it, the more I have a problem with Christians taking part in the idea of Santa Claus.  It's not the idea of lying to kids about an imaginary gif giver who breaks into your house to give stuff to kids that I hate so much (although there seems little to like about it), it's the very person of Santa that I have a problem with.

Santa has no investment in anyone's life, except as a checker of naughty and nice and a gift giver once a year.  Even the focus on naughty and nice has gone by the wayside in our culture.  He used to be a cautionary tale, where he was used to try to get kids to behave.  Now he's just this guy who comes once a year to give presents and we give kids a sense of entitlement to having him come and give them something.

We say that Christmas is about remembering the Son being born to reestablish us into relationship with the Father.  The gift of the son is a gift of renewed relationship.  Santa can't bring gifts of renewed relationships because by definition he can only bring stuff.  Stuff we don't need and stuff which, quite frankly, distracts us and our kids from remembering Jesus and the relationship he brings.

The other problem I have with Santa is that it takes only a small amount of thought to recognise that he neglects the poor.  Even in movies they often have to address this where Santa has not given presents to some poor kid, because we all know that there are plenty of kids who don't get presents from him.  But he always looks good in the end because this is the year that they get something.  How ridiculous.

I love Christmas because we can remember that Jesus came to earth to live and die to repair our relationship with God.  Maybe at Christmas time this year we can give each other presents that improve our relationships with each other, like time and experiences that bond us together, so that when we compare them to the gift that God gave we are in less danger of being struck by lightning.  Because I feel pretty uncomfortable comparing the gift of Jesus to a bike.