Fighting Christmas Consumer Culture Over My Kids

As the Christmas hype approaches mass media frenzy with our kids, we're trying to figure out how to help them be decent human beings in the midst of so much advertising and stuff (and promises of more stuff) coming their way.

The problem is that there's no magical path towards character and contentedness. Deprivation does not guarantee that they won't long for more stuff. Spoiling them certainly doesn't, either.

And the goal isn't to shame them into not wanting things that they see on t.v. or that their friends have or that they see in the Sunday paper. This is the wrong approach that many parents take who rightfully are concerned about their kids character during gift-giving season.

The goal is to help them grow up to be grateful for what they have, delighted to give to others, and, yes, grateful to receive as well. We must learn how to receive well, not to deny the value of receiving altogether. This, too, is part of character-development. If we never learn how to receive well, we will never be able to receive the gift of grace offered to us by God himself. I know some of these people. Being unable to accept a gift given in love is not a healthy thing.

All of this has to be done in age and stage appropriate ways. Our seven year old will get more of what Christmas is all about than our three year old will. And we shouldn't expect our seven year old to have thirty-year-old understanding of the more important things in life.

But we can help them to understand that it's important that we give and care more for others than be fixated on our own wants and desires. And that's mom and dad's job. If we don't create that space intentionally then character won't happen. People drift by the boatloads into self-absorbed consumerism. No one drifts into deep character.

So we're (finally) getting into gear with adopting a kid through World Vision--at least starting the process of figuring out what part of the world we want to invest in. And this past Sunday our church small group wrapped presents together that we bought for a family in need here in Durham.

And we're trying to put some limits around how much stuff they get. They get three gifts from us, like Jesus received from the three Wise Men. We try to avoid stuff that's just Christmas-morning buzz (i.e. cheap electronics that will break in two weeks) and go for things that they'll still be excited about using through the spring.

Much of this is my wonderful wife's doing. I appreciate how thoughtfully she's engaging the season and trying to help our kids grow up into Christmas time faithfully.

Only time will tell if we do a good job with our kids in regards to "stuff." My hope is that we can at least equip them with an alternative story about life that anchors it in something much bigger than either "more is always better" or even "you should feel guilty about wanting more stuff since you've got so much already."

And probably for next year, we need to see if we can get off all these toy catalog mailing lists that feed the imagination in all the ways that we ultimately don't want.

Handel in My Head Meets Swirling UNC Students on the Crosswalk

About a year and a half ago now my battery died in my car. Apparently, this was the first time since purchasing the car used that I'd ever changed the battery because the stereo/CD player is asking for a code that I have no recollection of ever knowing.

So what that means is that I listen to my Ipod while in transit. And last week, given that it's Christmas season, I was listening to Handel's Messiah as I found myself driving through UNC's campus on my way to a meeting with one of my staff.

The resulting experience gave me pause to consider.

In my ears, the London Philharmonic was in full throat, proclaiming the news that "unto us, a son is given." This good news that changes everything. In him heaven has given so much that heaven can give no more (Valley of Vision). God rips open the roof and come to get us himself.

But outside my car, students swirled about in the midst of a class change. They didn't hear the music. This good news that changes everything was perhaps known to some of them, perhaps not.

Either way, it was hot and fresh for me right then...and the thought that this Son given to us might be foreign to the students swirling around my car in the crosswalk, or cause for ambivalence, or even and especially cause for hostility, was crushing.

There are times when I wonder if I did enough while on campus to take this good news out of my head and onto the campus. Nothing specific that I regret doing or not doing. I just wonder.

And there are times when I wonder if in my daily life, I am faithful to get this song out of my head and out to friends, family. Not obnoxiously. Not arrogantly. But winsomely, graciously, boldly, deliberately.

I will continue to crank some Christmas tunes over the next couple of weeks. And my soul, I'm sure, will have moments of pure bliss and joyful worship.

But if it doesn't overflow to bless the people around me, especially folks who don't know, then it's all just further self-centered, self-absorbed, consumer me.

Disappointed with Christmas

So we had a tremendous Christmas--full of family, food, and gifts galore. But one of my kids is particularly sensitive to the anticipation and the hype of just about anything...and as my wife Kelly wisely pointed out afterward, it's impossible for Christmas to ever fully live up to all the build-up.

So we've been trying to help our child process being disappointed with Christmas. And that's brought up a number of conflicting thoughts.

On the one hand, the conventional response is the old "count your blessings" angle. We want to develop a heart in all three of our children that is grateful for what's been received, not one that is always clamoring for more.

And this is crucial for anyone. A heart that does not know gratitude cannot know Jesus.

But as I've been thinking about this, there's an additional parenting response that I'm considering: the affirmation and even celebration of disappointment.

The simple reality is that all of life has elements of disappointment. Our distant ancestors forfeited the possibility of ever being fully satiated when they rebelled against God and said they wanted to be like Him.

So life here in the Land of the Ruins disappoints. And that disappointment is designed to remind us that we aren't built for life in the Land of the Ruins. We were made to delight in the land of the Trinity, the Edenic paradise created just for us to tend and to love and to encounter God face to face.

Given that we don't live there any more I want to cultivate, both in myself and in my kids, a holy discontent with life here. I want it to be built around the reality that nothing here satisfies. Some day, by God's grace, all five of us will know full and final satisfaction.

But until that day, the post-Christmas disappointment can serve as a good reminder (if it is steered correctly) towards our created desire for the Creator who gave us the initial desire for total fulfillment.

"Thou hast mad us for thyself. And our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee," Augustine wrote. I pray for wisdom to try not to tame the restless heart with anything less glorious than the risen Christ and the hope that we have in him.

In the mean time if you've still got the tree up, time to take it down, yo. For some of you, the final redemption of all things will include Christmas carols and decorations that are up interminably. For the rest of us, we're ready for the new year....or at least we like to think so.

Good News About Christmas in Funkland

About ten years ago, I hit a major funk. All fall I was struggling--emotionally, physically, spiritually. And few things are worse than Christmas-time in funkland.

When you're in funkland during Christmas, everyone seems happy. Everyone's telling you to be of good cheer. You just want to shout, "don your own stinkin' gay apparel!" and running and hiding in a quiet place away from away from everyone.

On top of that, I was (and am) a religious professional! Christmas is supposed to be my big day, my prime time!

I had tried everything I knew to do to re-connect with the Lord: reading new books, re-reading old books, Scripture, prayer, journaling, fasting, all of it. Nothing doing.

I remember my wife and I were visiting my parents and we were coming home from a Christmas Eve service where I was once again reminded of how spiritually vacuous I was. I was in the back seat of my parents car (feeling like I was nine all over again) once again disappointed in myself and God who seemed to be doing nothing to give a brother a break...not even at Christmas time.

I remember praying in the midst of my disappointment: "God, I've done everything I know to do to get out of this hard place. Nothing has worked. Do you think that you could come to get me?"

And then it hit me. A bright, piercing ray of light in a dark place. God did come to get me. That's what Christmas is all about. That's what this whole Christianity thing is all about. It's not about performance-management, crisis-management, doing more of some things, doing less of other things, it's not about warm-fuzzies or happy days or sad days. It's not about any of that stuff.

Christmas is the good news of a God who has come to get us when we could not "get" ourselves. We couldn't get ourselves out of the spiritual death that we were stuck in. So God himself has come. He has come to get us.

If you're experiencing Christmas in funkland this year, I'm praying for you, even as I write this note. There's just know way around it: it's harder to be struggling during the holidays...and the holidays can take a hard place and make it infinitely worse.

But know this: God coming to get us, to rescue us from permanent funkland is what Christmas is all about.

Cheap Christmas Rings and Living a Life on Loan

I remember one year when I was in elementary school, my mom took us to a craft/trinkets fair at school where kids could buy Christmas presents for family and friends. My mom gave my brother and I some cash and we went and bought her Christmas present.

In the same way, God has given us this thing called a "self" that we might have something to offer back up to him. It is nothing that we earned or created. It is pure gift. And it originates from him and was made to be given back to him.

This is not only true on the macro, hypothetical level of the "self." It's true about everything that we call our lives. Friends, family, money, resources, work, spouses, children, churches--these things have all been loaned to us that we might have something to give back to our good Father, who loves us very, very much.

"Lean not on your own understanding," so says Proverbs, "in all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight."

Acknowledging him simply means living in the reality that this whole thing that we take so very seriously as "ourselves" and "our lives" and this drive that many of us feel to make a difference of make an impact or be important or whatever...it's all built on so much pomp and fluff and emptiness.

This whole life, every aspect, is on loan for just a short time. It's his, given to us briefly that we might have something to offer him.

I think I bought my mom a cheap, tacky, awful ring with her five dollars that she gave me. She lit up brighter than the Christmas tree--I remember it vividly.

That's how God is, even with our smallest and slightest attempts at living in the reality of his boundless provision and grace as we acknowledge him.

Caillou Christmas

The week leading up to Christmas, the kids were watching Caillou, a PBS kids show. For those of you who don't frequent PBS kids television, Caillou is a cartoon featuring a preschooler (Caillou) and his family. It's generally innocuous entertainment for the kids.

In this particular episode, Caillou's pre-school class was having a "holiday party." At one point in the show, Caillou says he's excited about the class "Christmas party." His mother immediately corrects him: "O no, Caillou, this is a holiday party." She goes on to explain that there are other holidays during this season and that there are kids in his class who celebrate those holidays.

A couple of parenting thoughts as I've been considering this exchange and what it teaches my kids.

1. This is as it ought to be. PBS can't elevate Christmas over the other holidays, nor should they. In other words, it is not PBS's job to teach my kids about the centrality of Christmas. That's my job.

To change the venue a bit, it's also not the public school's job to teach my children about the importance of Christmas. I wouldn't want even a Christian teacher in a public school to ignore the other holidays and the students under their care who celebrate those holidays.

2. At the same time, given that my faith commitments are to Christianity and not pluralism, I don't want Christmas simply lined up with every other possible holiday celebration. I want my kids to be able to engage other faith commitments (be it Judaism or pluralism) from the starting point of God's work in Christ, not from a pretend neutral center that does not actually exist.

3. So I want my kids to be able to engage with humility and gentleness the other celebrations around Christmas through the lense of Christmas. I want them to be firmly fixed on the certain good news that God has acted decisively in human history through the coming, working, dying and resurrection of Jesus Christ at a single point in time and history.

I want them to be able to see how this coming of Christ actually fulfills all the hopes and dreams and desires and partial-celebrations of Kwanzaa and (C)Hanuk(k)ah (thanks, Daniel). But I don't want that to create this un-necessarily intense bifurcation of we're the "good guys" and everyone else are the "bad guys."

4. But as Fowler has mapped, there are stages of faith. It takes emotional and intellectual maturity to be able to hold convictions firmly while also able to enter into the complexity of the world graciously and humbly--the best of us don't usually get there until mid-life!

So where does that leave my wife, me and our five-year-old, three-year-old (today! happy birthday, Zoe!), and 16-month old?

We have to teach them and equip them as best we can to live in a fairly complex, multi-cultural world from the viewpoint of Christian faith. We have to take opportunity to explain things as best we can, with language as best as they can grasp it, all the while praying a ton for wisdom and for the Spirit to do the work that only the Spirit can do.

We could also lock them up in a closet until they're 21, but I think that might be a bit of an over-reaction.

Much Ado About Santa

In our circles over the past couple of weeks, there's been much conversation about what to do about Santa. We want our kids to know the real purpose of Christmas, and Santa's a massive distraction for that.

I really like how my parents handled this, so we're going with it. Santa stuffs the stockings, that's it. So we knew who gave (and had to write freakin' thank you notes for) all the real gifts. Santa brought a boatload of candy an occasional small present along the way.

Just an idea for those of you who are in the same pre-school boat that we are. My good friend Marshall has a thoughtful post about this with a different take. Actually, our kids have shown very little interest in Santa to this point, but I'm sure that'll change.

Due to travel schedules around here, today is our family's Christmas Eve. We'll be doing our big opening tomorrow and then doing some traveling, so this is my last post for a couple of days. Here are a couple of sweet kid pics and Merry Christmas!


Davis and Zoe prepare for the church Christmas play. Zoe was an angel, Davis was a wise man. I laughed, I cried, I wanted to see it again and again. Better than Cats.

Emma Kate, at 15 months, is still learning how to walk. All her energy to this point, I believe, has gone to her vocal cords--she talks in EK-Language non-stop. We hoped that giving her sunglasses would help her to focus on her walking, but you can see how much good that did us.

Psalming my Way to Christmas

For the bulk of my college years and the years immediately following, Christmas was met with surprise and alarm at how quickly it passed without much genuine reflection or thought. The day itself was often met with panic--like an unexpected visit from a very important house guest.

So about ten years ago or so I began the habit of turning to the Christmas story in Luke once the calendar turned to December. This helped me to at least recognize that the house guest was on his way, whether I was ready or not.

But this year, my sense was that I needed to not return to Luke but rather stay the course in my read-through -the-Bible-in-just-over-four-years book that last time took me about seven or eight years to get through.

So I'm preparing for Christmas in the Psalms this year. And while it's a little more work to have to think "how does this point me to Christmas" it's been a wonderful place to contemplate how the coming of Christ is the fulfillment of all the promises and needs and desires of our hearts.

Consider these passages from Psalm 17 & 18:

Let my vindication come from you;

Show me the wonders of your great love,
you who save by your right hand

Rise up, LORD, confront them, bring them down;

He reached down from on high and took hold of me;
he drew me out of deep waters.

He rescued me from my powerful enemy,
from my foes, who were too strong for me.

I am particularly drawn to the repeated images of God's rescue of David in the Psalms--the rising up, the coming down, the deliberate movements in response to David's plight.

This seems to sum up quite well what Christmas is all about: God comes to get those who are desperately hemmed in by enemies and/or their own folly. These people are on the brink of death and have no resources in and of themselves to save themselves. David seems to be here often. It would seem from the Biblical account that we are here quite often as well (born in that place, even), though many of us would prefer not to consider this too deeply.

Christmas Music

So I've always loved Christmas music. I get this from my dad, who would start to listen to Christmas music in August if my mother would let him. As it is, we both have adopted Thanksgiving weekend as the official start to Christmas music season.

One thing that I'm recognizing as I listen to Christmas music this week is that more than ever I'm drawn to music that mingles the joy of Christmas with a tone of longing or waiting. "O Come, O Come, Immanuel" has long been one of my favorite Christmas songs. I find myself more than ever longing for music of that ilk.

There seems to be two extreme poles that you could land on during Christmas. On the one hand is a sloppy sentimentalism that glosses over all that's hard or difficult about life or this season in particular. On the other hand is a cynical, nihilistic despair and hopelessness that is equally lazy about engaging all that is good or hopeful about life or this season in particular.

Christian theologians have coined a sweet phrase for the tension that I want to live in during this Christmas season: the already and the not yet. Christmas has already come. Christ has already come, lived, died and rose again. Death and sin and Satan have all been conquered. It is already done.

And yet it is not yet done in terms of our experience of these things. We still wrestle with sin, death, sadness and Satan. Christ has come and he will come again. We live in the time in-between. All the relief and victory that we long to experience has already been secured for us but it has not yet been experienced in all the fullness of joy that we long for.

So I want to live in the already and the not yet this Christmas faithfully, neither lilting towards sentimentalism on the one hand nor hardened cynicism or apathy on the other. There is much to be joyful about: Christ has come! There is much to long for: Christ will come again!

So we celebrate the reality that Christmas is all about the good news of the God who comes to get us. And we also continue to cry out: come, Lord Jesus! And I find that I'm aided in that journey by music that strikes the note of both sides of this coin: the joy of the coming of the Messiah, and the longing for his final return to make all things new, all things well.

Merry Christmas (Still)

One of the problems with being a culture that is perpetually in a hurry is not only do we not wait well, we do not celebrate well, either. Been to a wedding recently? Only the wedding party (who has to) stays to see the couple off. I'm surprised people haven't started leaving after the couple says "I do."

And so December is a mad rush of buying and scurrying and hurrying. And then Christmas Day comes we exchange presents and eat a big meal. We wake up the next morning with post-Christmas hangover. And more than a few of us are both relieved that it's over and wonder how we managed to "miss Christmas" again this year. We box up the decorations with a mixed emotions and move on to New Year's resolutions.

In the midst of this pattern in my own life, I've deeply appreciated my new-to-me Anglican church experience. The Anglican church emphasizes waiting and anticipating during the Advent-weeks leading up to Christmas. So much so that if you're "a real Anglican" you don't decorate the house or the tree or listen to any Christmas music or wish anyone a "Merry Christmas" until the day of. It's all about longing and expectancy--not only longing for Jesus to come in the flesh but also a longing for his return to earth to make all things right.

When Christmas finally does come it's not just one day. It's twelve days. The pressure is off to have a mystical, magical, spiritually-ecstatic experience on December the 25th each year. Twelve full days to allow the enormity of the incarnation event sink in, take root, make its' home in your heart, mind, and soul. There are twelve full days to listen to Christmas music with impunity.

So I'm still listening to my Charlie Brown Christmas, long after the local mix station has gone back to their normal format after being "the Triangle's official Christmas music station" (much to the relief of the dj's, I'm sure, who were forced to endure the same 20-song playlist for the previous four weeks...which, now that I think about it, isn't any different from their normal format). And I'm loving that today is seventh day of Christmas. Slowing down long enough to enjoy and actually experience life rather than just hurry through it is something I need plenty of help with.

Christmast Expectation

My readers are mostly smarter than I am, so perhaps you've already figured all this stuff out...

So I realized over Christmas what it was as a kid that at least in part made Christmas such a magical time. There was a sense in my imagination that something that was waiting for me on Christmas morning could radically alter my world for the good. My world was simple and small. It did not take much to turn it in significantly different and wonderfully better directions: the right toy car, a video game system (never did get that Atari that was at the top of my list for several years), a new bike, etc.

So on the days leading up to Christmas I lived in expectation and hope and anticipation of how my Christmas morning loot would radically alter my life. And I can't remember ever being disappointed as a kid...even when I didn't get my Atari.

I remember the first Christmas I did feel disappointed about Christmas morning. I was in Junior High, that awkward time of transition and change where my head and ears were grossly disproportionate to the rest of my body. My world was getting bigger (like my ears) and more complex. Packages and gifts weren't going to change it nearly as easily. I couldn't articulate this at the time, I simply realized that my expectations of Christmas had be ratcheted down.

I'm not sure what to make of all this apart from observing it and perhaps stating that it's not a bad thing as a kid to have a small world that is easily made much more fun. In the Scriptures Paul states that when he was a child he talked and reasoned as a child and then when he became a man he put childish things behind him. This is not to say that childish things are inappropriate for a child. Just not for a grown man or woman.

So it would be a little messed up for me as a thirty-three year old to have that same giddy expectation that Christmas morning's presents would change everything. But now I get to enjoy watching my kids have that hope. And I rest in the bigger reality of One Christmas gift that started it all that really did change things once and forever.

No, not the Atari.

Self-Giving

This'll be my Christmas post. The next couple of days will be full with family and more gifts to open per capita than all of Bangladesh.

The best gift I ever received was easily a gift I got from my brother one year for my birthday. We were both two years out of college. I was in Richmond, working with InterVarsity at Virginia Commonwealth University and things were more or less falling apart. Daniel was in seminary in Philadelphia.

Our relationship had been fairly good since high school and through college. But we were in a hard place at that time. I was insecure in my work (the chapter was falling apart, after all) and I wasn't sure that my brother (a.k.a. "the smart one") theologically agreed that para-church ministry was a legit thing. We had a couple snippy conversations. Things were a little tense.

So my b-day rolls around in late-February and I get a thick envelope in the mail from him. Enclosed is a pocket-sized calendar. He has marked off every-other-week as a "call from Daniel" week. There's a note enclosed. His birthday gift to me is that he is committing to call me every other week for the next year.

He sticks by his commitment. He calls me every-other-week for the next year. It is the turning point in our adult relationship. Nowadays, we talk just about every week. Daniel is far and away the person outside of Kelly that knows me the best and that I can talk to about anything. He gave me the gift of himself that year, it changed everything.

This self-giving is the heart of the Christmas story. An old Puritan prayer says something to the effect of in Christ Jesus God has given us so much that heaven can give no more. God gives us the gift of Himself. It is the deepest need of all of us, the place of redemption and hope and life for some, the place of stumbling and final and ultimate rejection for others. If the Christian story is true and God Himself has come to get us, then it can be nothing other than ultimately definitive for all of us.

Merry Christmas.

Redemption

Some fight against this offer of living life under the umbrella of grace and mercy on the grounds that they would much rather stand or fall on their own merit rather than have their fate decided by someone or something else.

Good luck with that.

If redemption is the universal cry of our souls, what sign or proof do we have either in our own personal experience or the experience of human history that we are able to secure that redemption for ourselves?

Redemption, that is the making right of all the broken places in our lives, seems to require some sort of in-breaking from the outside. To draw upon my eleventh grade chemistry recollections, if our lives are "closed systems" then we are stuck with our own baggage and redemption is impossible. If all of human history is a closed system then humanity as a whole is doomed.

But the Christian story is that the precise in-breaking that is needed to turn the story around has happened. When we were stuck in our regrets and guilt and shame, God came to get us. God himself has become one of us, entered into our regrets and guilt and shame and finally into death itself and overcome all of it. He has redeemed all of History in precisely the only way it could be redeemed.

And so you and I don't have to struggle and strive for the redemption our souls long for. It has been fought for and won already on our behalf and it's now offered to us as a free gift.

Merry Christmas.

More of What Christmas Ain't

Okay, so one more post...

What secular, humanistic Christmas does is disembody what were originally Christian concepts linked to God Himself. Words like love, peace and joy are ripped from their original contexts by early humanists who, like most Western philosophies developed over the past several hundred years, were both reacting against and borrowing from Christianity.

The point in its' modern application is to try to retain "the good stuff" without the scandal of particularity. After all, it isn't only Christians who want peace, love, and joy.

The problem, of course, then becomes one of definitions. Peace means mighty different things to the people on the two sides of the conflict in Gaza. Joy is defined differently by the stoic and the hedonist.

What secular humanism has done by attempting to remove the scandal of particularity has simply imposed new problems--that of parochialism, each of us defining the terms as we like. This would seem to defeat the original purpose of the universal good.

In Christianity we proclaim that there is no disembodied virtue. There is no such thing as theoretical peace, theoretical love, and theoretical joy. The Word has become flesh and made His dwelling among us. What is peace? Look at Jesus. What is joy? Look to Jesus. What is love? We see it in the Christ.

And so again we see that secular humanism Christmas misses the point entirely. The injunction for us to seek peace can only find its' proper hope anchored in the reality that Peace has already come to get us. Love and Joy have done the same. This is what we celebrate at Christmas--not our own meager attempts at moving towards hypothetical ideals but in these ideals becoming Human and coming to get us.

And so yes, we must press on with all our might into love, joy, and peace. But as Christians we do so deeply rooted in the reality that love, joy, and peace has already come to get us, live and in the flesh. And that's worth celebrating.

What Christmas Ain't

I don't think that we need the secular, commercial world to "keep Christ in Christmas" (see my December 30, 2005 post on that). But I do think that as secularism tries to take control of Christmas that it's important for Christians to be able to recognize and articulate the differences between the Christian message of Christmas and the secular (usually humanisitic) message of Christmas.

Incidentally, I think that it's important to see that as we discuss moving from a Christian view of Christmas to a secular view of Christmas, we are not moving from a 'biased' world view to an 'un-biased' or neutral world view. Every world view has bias, every world view has certain suppositions that may or may not be founded in the Truth and Reality that has made us and redeemed us. Our culture would have us to believe that Christianity is a certain spin on the world while secularism has no spin whatsoever. This is a total lie.

The biggest difference that I have perceived over the past several years as I've thought about the difference between the secular humanist Christmas and Christian Christmas is that secularism would have Christmas to be about the triumph of the hope of humanity. With secular Christmas we look for peace on earth, good will to everyone, maybe this year we can all finally get along. It is about warm-fuzzies and the celebration of our one, shared humanity. And the hope is that as we recognize this one humanity, we can all forge ahead together for a better future for everyone.

Now, I'm all for peace on earth. I'm all for everyone getting along. I'm all for warm fuzzies about our shared humanity. But this is a total gutting of the Christian story of Christmas. The Christian story is emphatically NOT about the hope that we can all get along in our humanity. It is both radically contrary to our humanity and at the same time it is radically more affirming of our humanity than the secular story.

It is contrary to the warm-fuzzy secular Christmas story in that it in God coming to rescue us, we are exposed as a human race as utter failures. There is no sign of any hope that in and of ourselves we can ever come to the place of shared peace. God has to intervene because left to our own devices, we are stuck in hatred for one another and towards God. If God does not come to get us, we are forever and always dead--dead humanity walking. All of this in spite of (and indeed, often because of) our best efforts.

And at the same time the Christian Christmas story is infinitely more affirming of our humanity than the secular Christmas story because of the power and wonder of incarnation. God has seen fit to take on human flesh. He comes to get us not as disembodied spirit but as a person. A man. A baby. Born in a particular po-dunk town, to particular poor parents, to change the world forever. God takes on flesh to redeem all flesh. God becomes human to roll back the curse on our humanity that makes it impossible for us to save ourselves.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the whole secular Christmas story (at least to me) is that it will be preached in more than one "Christian" Christmas service this weekend. We must be vigilant in understanding the difference between these two stories of Christmas. To lose the actual Christmas story for a bastardized version of it would be to lose all the wonder of the brokenness and the redeemed-ness of our humanity.

Have a Holly Jolly Christmas

So I assume that wherever you're checking in from, most likely you have a radio station in your area that plays Christmas music starting around Thanksgiving (or Halloween or the 4th of July or St. Patrick's Day) until Christmas day. Here in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area, we've got Lite (why is it always misspelled like that for radio stations?) 98. And, being the gushy, sentimental, hopelessly romantic slop that I am, I've been listening to it in the car and sometimes when I'm working in the office.


There's one song that I would like to formally lodge a complaint against: Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas. At the outset it seems like your typical Americana/Christmas fare: campy, overly-repetitive lyrics, cutesy, and short. But there's a phrase nestled in there that will sneak past you if you aren't paying attention:

"Ho, ho, the mistletoe, hung where you can see
Somebody waits for you, kiss her once for me."

Okay, so "no taxation without representation" is foundation to our American government/the American way of life. Substitutionary atonement--the idea that Jesus died in our place to pay for our sin--is foundational to Christian faith. But representational, substitutionary kissing is not cool. It's creepy. There's no kissing someone for somebody else. It's just oogy.

Good people I implore you, please: join with me in alerting everyone you know to the dangers of "Have a Holly Jolly Christmas," with it's sleezy voyeurism, and unforgiveable old-man creepiness, and make everyone's holiday a little more jolly indeed.