A Fun Christmas? Not This Year!
November 12th, 2009
Think very long, and very hard, about the following headline used for a story published by a Christian retailing association, reporting a survey by a consumer specialist, predicting that sales will be lower this Christmas:
Survey warns that Christmas “Won’t Be Fun” This Year.
Can you think of a better example of just about everything wrong with our culture’s view of Christmas, and, sadly, the view of too many in the Church as well? In light of the Incarnation, can any Christmas celebration, when celebrated in the grace of the gifts Christ gives, not be “fun” [that word properly understood, of course!].
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Personally, I am in favor of deleting all commercialism from Christmas. Between the senseless secret Santa gift-giving events I have to endure at work (the biggest secret is that I don’t even like most of the people I work with!), the nearly eight weeks of secular music that floods the radio stations, the tsunami of mindless animated “holiday” specials that hijack the tv networks, and the politically correct atheist co-workers who send me “Merry Chris-Hannu-Kwanza” greetings via email, there is nothing I like more than finding a quiet candlelit church to ESCAPE from this pointless and empty seasonal goodwill. These things actually depress me–And I see them as inescapable proof that we needed God to die in our place to save us from ourselves and our ridiculous behavior and thinking. Make Christmas less “fun” and it might be less stressful, more peaceful, and give more reason for hope rather than despair.
Maybe fun will move over and make room for joy.
We, as a culture, want to be entertained. We want to have fun. Work should be fun, life should be fun, etc. We want Church to be fun as well. When this type of attitude drives our view of life and of the Church, we end up with the happy clapply church services that we see across in American “evangelicalism” and in many LCMS churches. We confuse fun for joy.
This is nothing new. As the book of Judges teaches us about God’s people “cycling” from devotion to self-absorption to despair to repentance to devotion, so Dickens wrote the classic _Christmas Carol_ over 100 years ago to address this folly.
It sounds like little has changed in Christian Retailing from 15-20 years ago when I was highly involved.
Too bad much of Evangelicalism has tossed aside Advent and only “kept” Christmas.
@Pr. Tom Fast
I like that!