Christmas

Good morning, God, and thanks for this new day in our lives. It's Christmas Eve, and Christmas comes tomorrow. It's a day that I love to experience every year because it's a day when we're supposed to be focused on love, peace, joy, and hope. It's a day that originally was about you "coming" to earth as a person to be some sort of savior, though since you're everywhere all the time, it doesn't seem to be all that necessary for you to have to come to earth to "save" us. You do that all the time just by being, it seems to me. We're the ones who tend to shut you out of our lives, and that could make us feel that we need an intercessor when dealing with you.

I think I love Christmas mostly because of the ways that people focus on each other rather than themselves. Of course, I realize that much of what people do for others does come with selfish motives, but all in all, during this time of the year people are willing to do more for their fellow human beings with less question than we're willing to do during the rest of the year. It gets our focus outside of ourselves and on others and their wants and needs, and gets us in a frame of mind that allows us to try to meet some of those wants and needs.

I often wonder what the world would be like if we could approach life and living and other people in that way, every day of the year. I think that Christmas acts as a wonderful reminder of what we're supposed to be like and how we're supposed to act, but the shame of it is that it's wrapped up in a day that's now more about commercialism and getting than it is about compassion and giving.

So what do we do about Christmas? How do we make it about love and hope and not so much about the presents? When I look under the tree I see a lot of presents, and it's just my wife and me--shouldn't we be able to have a simple Christmas with no presents at all, and still enjoy the day just as much? Or am I compensating too much for having had so many Christmases with very few gifts? Or am I over-analyzing, and we just found quite a few things that we simply wanted to give to each other? I know that they're not super-expensive gifts, just some things that we thought we would like. I don't want to think too much about something that shouldn't be thought about too much, like motives for gift-giving.

A reply:

Christmas is rather complicated, isn't it? It's about the story of a virgin birth many years ago that didn't even take place in December, combined with non-religious holidays having to do with the winter solstice, now about gifts and food more than about togetherness and love. The togetherness is still there for many, many people, yet it's somehow become less important than the gifts and the parties and such. While it is nice to see children get excited about getting gifts, for example, you do them a great disservice when you teach them to equate a day with such an important message to getting gifts that are, for the most part, unnecessary in their lives--they may be enjoyable things like toys and books, but the vast majority of the gifts that are given are completely unnecessary, when all is said and done.

But isn't that what often makes gifts so special--the fact that they're things that you want, but wouldn't necessarily buy for yourself, or couldn't buy for yourself? A gift should be about the recipient's wants and needs, not about just needs. There are times in our lives when there isn't enough money to satisfy many of the wants, and then it's important to focus on the needs. But all in all, a gift is a gift, and there shouldn't necessarily be a need to quantify its value or justify it.

The gift that I gave to you--the gift upon which Christmas is based--is the ability to hope and to love. That's what the holiday is about, and you can make it whatever you want. It can be just as valuable with a thousand gifts under the tree as it can with no gifts under the tree. The gifts are a beautiful reminder of how good we can feel when we put our minds on others and their wants and needs. My hope is that people remember how that feels and continue to focus on others for the rest of the year. Of course, I can't force them to do so, so most people simply get caught right back up in their own little rat races or dramas, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try!

The gift I gave to you is my love, and I ask you to pass it on, any way that you know how, all day, every day, if possible. It's yours to do with as you please, but remember that the more we share it, the more it grows. Your goal is to help it spread around the entire world and to become a part of every person on this planet. A world of human beings who all are focused on love would be a beautiful world indeed.