The War on Christmas

As the Christmas season draws nearer, we will soon see the endless parade of pundits who will declare the "war on Christmas". And they'll be compelling. They'll show you department store Santas out of a job, they'll show you clerks who are told to use generic holiday greetings...anything they can to convince you that Christmas has been crushed under the grinding wheels of political correctness.

The truth is, they are partly right and partly wrong. There IS a war on Christmas. But it's not being waged by the people we think.

Let me take you back to Christmas 1981. I was an 11 year old boy, and I knew we wouldn't have much for Christmas. We had moved over 1000 miles to our new home in our old station wagon, and were starting over: me, my sister, and three brothers, one of them four months old at the time. Our main concern was getting through the winter with what we had on hand.

We were new to the area, so we didn't know anybody, really. New school, new community, and we lived on such limited means that I doubt most folks in today's America could survive. We went to bed on Christmas Eve with a scattering of homemade presents underneath the remarkably dated aluminum foil Christmas tree that my mother had goten at a discount from working at a department store.

About midnight, we were awakened by a knock on the door. My mother opened it, and a guy in a cheap Santa suit came in with what seemed to us like a million presents, as well as food for the next day. One of those presents I still remember vividly: an Atari 2600, the "dream gift" for us. The Christmas we wouldn't have was saved by people from the church who didn't care that they didn't know us that well, al they cared was that we have a good Christmas.

One of my favorite Christmas songs is the Longfellow poem "Christmas Bells". I've always identified with the next to last verse:

And in despair I bowed my head/"There is no peace on earth", I said/"For hate is strong and mocks the song/Of Peace on Earth goodwill to men".

As Christians, we have a distinct duty to serve God by serving our fellow-man. Every time we put our own greeds above the needs of others in our community, we wage a war on Christmas. Every time we rationalize away our responsibility to the poor, we are waging a war on Christmas. Every night a child goes to bed hungry in this, the richest country in the world, we are waging a war on Christmas.

A "war on Christmas" can't be won by displacing the department store Santas. Christmas was never about Santa, or fancy gifts or conspicuous consumption. While Christmas means many things to many different cultures, in the Christian tradition, at least, it is about the Advent, the coming of Jesus Christ, a man who taught us to see others as higher than ourselves, and to serve "the least of these". When we as a society turn our backs on the poor and serve ourselves, we are waging the cruelest, bloodiest war on Christmas that can be waged. And the casualties can be seen underneath the freeway overpasses, in the back alleys, on the park benches, and in the slums and hovels of our inner cities. If you're looking for Jesus in the toy aisle at Target, you are definitely, most definitely looking in the wrong place.

If this Christmas, Christians would look to fulfill the instructions of Christ and to live in service to their fellow man not only on December 25 but also throughout the year, the war on Christmas will have been won. And suddenly we won't be so concerned about the presence or absence of the department store Santa. .