Man, I haven't posted on here in 11 days. And you can pretty much count on the fact that I haven't added any words to my novel, either. I got lost in the word desert the last couple of days, working on my tan.
But I guess that's normal this time of year. I don't know about the rest of you, but December comes, and I am sucked into Christmas. Big time.
To some people, that's a little weird. I mean, my sister asked me if we were still going to celebrate Christmas even though I'm now out as an atheist. (As an aside, may I point out that my parents have never, ever, ever claimed to be Christians and raised us to *fear* the church, but they are as coo-coo for Christmas as anybody I have ever met?) Of course! I love Christmas. I love the fact that for one month of the year it is okay to be happy, sing out loud for no reason at all and give people stuff. It is okay to eat fat and sugar. It was socially acceptable to wear red and green together. I love the fact that Christmas legalizes dorkiness and loving behavior. The rest of the year, those guys get swept under the designer rug of cultural norms, but this time of year, it's acceptable.
Of course, I hate all the commercial junk and the non-stop marketing blitz. Kind of. They're part of the window dressing for me, and in some ways I wouldn't trade them for anything. That said, I don't watch tv, listen to the radio or go to the mall, so that pretty means my entire exposure to marketing consists of Internet ads and stuff they put on buses. It's really pretty tame.
Happy sigh. I gotta dash. I have Christmas cards to finish.
2 comments:
I think Christmas stopped being primarily about Jesus for a lot of people a long time ago, especially when the smart people who know such things started yelling about the probability that Jesus was actually born in the spring. :) For us, Christmas is a time to celebrate family and friends.. It's sort of like Thanksgiving but on steroids and with presents!
I see Christmas as an expansion of everything Jesus came to the world to do. The hope, the light, the love at that very moment of his arrival are so overwhelming that the celebration expands to everything in life, which is why the season has so much joy. On the dark night of Christmas Eve, I sit in church looking into my candle and imagine what that moment just have been like so long ago, when all of creation was holding its breath, waiting, when the Savior that had been promised for so long was about to appear, and my eyes fill with tears from the sheer wonder of it all. It is sometimes too overwhelming to fully understand.
And this is what Christmas is, the wonder. This is why it is such a powerful time of year. When you pull out the reason for the celebration, yes, the residual bits remain, but I think that in the end it will disintegrate into something meaningless, as our commercial culture encourages.
The wonderful thing about Christmas is that since it is celebration of Jesus' birth, it doesn't really matter whether Jesus was born on that night or not. (And yes, probably not.) It's just a moment set aside to recall the events of that night in real-time, and that, really, can be done anytime of the year. 8')
Sorry I didn't get a chance to comment earlier (darn illness!!) but I hope you don't mind me throwing my two cents in!
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