By the time you are reading this, it will be Wednesday, Dec. 26, the day after Christmas 2012. I realize that to many across the country, once Christmas day is past, the Christmas season winds down. As some will say, Christmas is over for this year. Sadly, some may even be relieved in thinking Christmas is over. On the day after Christmas, the house may be busy with taking down decorations, packing away the trimmings, discarding the wrappings and getting back to normal, everyday routines; except that the children still have some days off from school “after” Christmas.
As the years of my life have moved along, now having become quite a few, I become more convinced that we are robbing ourselves of great things in the way that we have let Christmas go in the contemporary world.
One of the things I think I have discovered across theyears is that sometimes we need to revive great old ideas, and we need to realize that not all new ideas are good ideas. Christmas is a great old idea of the church of Jesus Christ. For the church, Christmas is not over on the day after Christmas. Rather, the Christmas festival is beginning. The festival of Christmas is in preparation for four weeks prior to Christmas day, as worshippers observe the season of advent, focused on the scriptural and historical expectations of God’s gift of redemption, the coming of the Anointed One, the Messiah, the Christ! After weeks of waiting and preparation, on Christmas Day the festival season arrives!
The celebration begins!
I grew up occasionally hearing the song, “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” I liked the song; I liked the tune; and the words seemed clever, about gifts for my true love during the 12 days of Christmas. I didn’t fully realize for some years that the Twelve Days of Christmas is not just a song, but that the 12 days hails from the traditional celebration of Christmas by the Church. And, the Twelve Days doesn’t refer to 12 days leading up to Christmas, it refers to the 12 days of celebration which begins on Christmas Day and continues in festival until Jan. 6. The festival remembers Christmas beginning as heaven’s angels announce to a band of shepherds keeping their flocks in the field that the Savior, the Lord’s Christ, is born in Bethlehem. They can find him there, a humble manger serving as his bed. Finally, 12 days later, on Jan. 6, the festival concludes with a celebration rememberingthe coming of the wise ones from an eastern land, coming to reverence him, several days after the shepherds visit, and bringing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
Sometimes celebrations over time have a way of slipping loose from their moorings. The widespread success of Christmas, the wide observance of the season as a holiday, has also seen forces moving the celebration off its foundations. As a gift-giving season, intended to express the caring and generosity of the spirit of the Christ, and reverently celebrating God’s great gift for the salvation of all, somehow evolves into a huge rush and crush of commercial activity. The commercial “Christmas” today seems to begin with black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when everyone supposedly gets all excited about getting to the store for the first chance at the great deals that willbe offered. Then, after the weekend, comes Cyber Monday, when supposedly all the excited shoppers will be ordering gifts online.
I boycott them both; I’m sorry.
A few years ago I was hearing a radio ad from a business in Rogers who was putting on a “Twelve Days of Christmas Sale.” It tended to support my concern that crass commerce is trying to take over the Christmas season; especially since their sale was for the 12 days before Christmas, not the actual Twelve Days “of” Christmas! Even Santa Claus, that great old remembrance of St. Nicholas, who cared about the forgotten and unfortunate children of his times, can now be seen in a new job, advertising goods in department stores, seeming to teach that Christmas is about getting great stuff and great bargains. I’m for the original “Santa,” who cared about the children whomJesus loves.
I’m thinking, too, that Christmas, far from being about tinsel and mistletoe, is a message of hope to the real world, the dark world, our needy world, our hurting world, our tragic world.
Isn’t it interesting that when Jesus was born, the busyness of Bethlehem almost crowded him out. There was no place for them, except in a little stable. The world still crowds him out.
Yet, he is there for us all.
He is the best life offers.
Without him, there is really no Christmas, nothing to celebrate. He is the Light of the World!
Let’s celebrate Christmas!
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 12/26/2012