The Real Reason for the Season?

A. Unabashed Pacifist:

I’m dancing challenged, but when peace comes, I will dance.

B. Unabashed Christian:

Holy One,

When I look at “organized” religions, I tend to become very pessimistic.
I know you live partly in them, too, but really, they often provide an extremely distorted picture of you, a blasphemous image, I would say.
They seem to think they control you, that you are at their service and that they should control those who would know and serve you. Fortunately, they cannot control you or confine you within their sanctuaries.
People can hear you speaking over the declamations of preachers, through the hardened walls of conventional beliefs and practices. People can and do interact with you quite apart from religion.
Your Spirit blows where it wills, even bringing reformation on occasion.
Amen

C. Un-quoting Jesus:

“Yes, I know the stories told about my birth, but verily I say to you, I came from the planet Krypton.”

[Perhaps as likely a story as the one we have? But He never said anything like it!]

D. Blog: Reason for the Season?

It must be the holiday season. I’m getting grumpy about the disconnect between “Christmas” and Jesus. Reason for the season? I don’t think so.

I think we have several other reasons for the season. Primarily devoted, I suppose, to giving. Or perhaps to helping merchants make a profit. Or giving in to materialistic desires and temptations. Or, for many, the ideal of family. Or perhaps to a nostalgic image of the past.

Whatever. We see very little during the season that reminds us of the one who said “Seek first the dominion of God’s justice and peace.” If He’s present in the season at all in our culture, he only appears as an amazing holy infant who sleeps silently through the night. That concession hardly counts as “putting Christ in Christmas.” It compares to celebrating Abraham Lincoln because he was born in a log cabin in the hills of Kentucky where the stars shone bright.

I wonder whether we should stop calling it Christmas, give the holiday a name that actually reflects what we appear to be celebrating. We could call it, perhaps, the Winter Festival of Giving, the Season of Winter Warm Fuzzies, Commercial-mas, Santa-mas, the Annual Buying/Spending Binge, or the Celebration of Materialism.

As every mall in America demonstrates, the season has much more to do with that imaginary Santa Claus than it does with the real Jesus. The Grinch had nothing to do with stealing "Christ"-mas. It had already disappeared and it won’t likely return. Harumph!