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CURLY QUESTION
What If We Stopped Celebrating Christmas?
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I’d be a kilogram lighter and somewhat richer. I’d have fewer socks (I have enough already). There’d be space in the cupboard where Christmas decorations are kept, and I’d miss the multiple email updates from friends who only get in touch each December. Actually, I would miss those most.
Does Christmas matter, and is it appropriate for a ‘secular’ society to put all their usual activity to one side so that the ever-smaller Christian population can have time out to celebrate the birth of Jesus? This matters when you remember that plenty of Christians don’t get excited about Christmas, complaining it is too commercialised, or that it is unlikely that December 25th was the day of Jesus’ birth. Or whatever it is they like to grouch about. I spent many years as the principal of a theological college and remember a student flopping down in my office and complaining that he had to write an essay on John 1:14: ’And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.’ When I asked what the problem was, he replied that, ‘the idea had been done to death’.
We’ve heard the Christmas story so often that it no longer ignites our imagination or sparks us to generosity. Is that the problem? We’ve got so used to the idea it no longer moves us?
Perhaps we are looking at it the wrong way. What if Christmas had never happened? What if Jesus never came and we had a world minus Christianity?
That’s a confronting question. Christians have been at the forefront of so many social changes— like William Wilberforce and the struggle to help
