When the Christmas inflatable of the Stegosaurus with a Santa hat on and a present on his tail appeared in Walmart during September this year, I knew I was in for trouble. This year, I was ready to dive headlong into yuletide cheer before the jack-o-lanterns ever appeared on my sleepy suburban street. You see, I'm that person that emerges in a tacky Christmas sweater the first time the temperature dips below 60 degrees. There are many people like me. We rabid Christmas lovers are a big crowd.
After waiting for Thanksgiving to pass (some of us patiently and others of us not so patiently), it is officially Christmas... and there is nothing that the rest of you can do about it.
Bring on the Bing Crosby. Deck those halls with boughs of holly. Watch Elf until you start calling everyone who disagrees with your life choices a cotton-headed ninny muggins. It's Christmas and it only comes once a year! Revel in winter wonderland bliss as long as you possibly can.
Burn a cinnamon apple candle with a Christmas-y name. Put a cinnamon broom in your living room. Shoot, put a cinnamon broom in every room. Put up a nine foot tall Christmas tree and get the biggest ladder you can find just so you can decorate the whole tree.
Shop for days on end to get all the best gift deals. Get stuck in massive mall crowds until you wonder what in the world you're doing.
But really, What are we doing?
Think about it: why does the greatest time of the year almost always end in everyone running crazy, trying to buy up the perfect gifts, scrubbing the walls in their house, or doing some other thing to achieve a picture perfect Christmas.
Maybe it is our all-American desire to have the perfect little Norman Rockwell Christmas. Maybe it is the intense pressure to make sure that we are making perfect Christmas memories for our families. I think the most likely reason of all is the fact that we've forgotten what Christmas is all about.
We are all Charlie Brown trying to make Christmas just perfect. We are all young Ebenezer Scrooge who can't even let ourselves relax just one day a year. We are all the people sleeping in Bethlehem while the Savior lays in the manger.
There is so much more to Christmas than snowflakes and cinnamon brooms, presents and feasts, candy canes and mistletoe, or TV specials and jolly tunes. All these things give us warm feelings, but they don't give us hope. Christmas is all about one thing: hope.
In church we sing songs like "Go Tell it on the Mountain" and "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," but maybe we aren't always thinking about the words we are singing. Maybe that is because they've just become another part of our Christmas rituals. Just imagine the magic of the first Christmas for a moment.
All your life, you've been waiting for God to show up. You've been waiting for hope. Then these heavenly beings come to you and you have no clue what is going on or what is going to happen to you, but they tell you not to be afraid because what they are about to tell you is going to change your life. It is going to do more than change your life, it is going to change the rest of history.
From that night on, the world has never been the same. The course of history has been indelibly molded by the life of one man: Christ.
You see, that night the angels told the shepherds about the good news of great joy which was for all people.
When we celebrate Christmas, we are celebrating so much more than family or togetherness no matter how amazing those things are. We are celebrating the birth of Hope. We are celebrating the greatest gift humanity has ever been given.
