Christian Christmas

Christian Christmas verses Secular Christmas
By Steven Coffman

As a young kid in the 1960's I remember watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade with enthusiasm. I enjoyed seeing the wonderful floats, celebrities, giant balloons, and the marching bands, but I knew at the end of the parade would be Santa Claus! This signified the end of the Thanksgiving Day holiday, and the beginning of the Christmas holiday.

Even though I went to Sunday school at our church and learned about the birth of the Christ child, as a kid, I seemed to pay more attention towards the Santa Claus version. This was because I was always anxious for Christmas morning to arrive so that I could see what Santa had brought me this year!

Being immature, as all kids are, I focused more on what I was getting that day, and not what this day was truly meant to celebrate for. Probably as young Christians, most of us start out on a similar path, and then grow up, never changing our focus for what the day was meant to truly be about. The greed and selfishness of what we was getting or giving became the emphasis for this day.

Business owners are keen to this weakness of ours, and do their best to monopolize on it. The greed and selfishness of their business missing out on a nickel of sales, or the store across the street getting your nickel has become their driving force. With this said, and as the years passed, the start of the Christmas season campaigns started earlier and earlier almost every year. The secular holiday had a firm grip on most of us, and wasn’t about to let go.

I noticed that in the 1970's the Christmas season began rolling out at the beginning of November. Then in the 1980's the commercial blitz was on and the'store displays began showing up right after Halloween at the end of October. The 1990’s kept pushing the start of the commercial Christmas season even earlier, and some displays were starting to appear before Halloween.