Christmas time shouldn't be a humbug, now or later

I’m having a hard time getting into the Christmas spirit. Normally I would have had my tree up and house decorated about a week or so ago.

Instead, I just finished getting lights and some decorations on the tree, a couple nutcrackers in place and a few other knickknacks set up. I still have more to go, and I’ve had my boxes of decorations in my living room and kitchen for over a week now.

I think part of it is a time thing. Since changing our coverage beats and assuming all news reporting duties, I have had less free time than before to spend with family, friends and personally. What spare moments I have are dedicated to home maintenance and operations.

The other part is I’m beginning to see this time of year as irrelevant in the grander scheme of things. Now, before you fly off the handle and begin angrily attacking me as waging war on Christmas, or even being un-Christian, please understand I don’t expect you to feel as I do, and I hope you do not.

I’m not trying to persuade anybody to my viewpoint. But, if you are angry, you may have just experienced a sample of what I mean and will explain.

Also, understand something about me. I am a Christian. I come from a long line of Disciples of Christ pastors on my dad’s side and a devout, practicing Presbyterian family on my mom’s.

I grew up in the church, and after a time of straying away because of disagreements, have returned and been active in my church in Spokane since 2006.

I read my Bible. I know my Bible, perhaps not as much as others or as I know the back of my hand, but enough to be dangerous.

That’s why I am beginning to see the Christmas season as irrelevant, in as much as its place in forming the backbone of my faith. I have my reasons.

First, we treat it as just that: a season, a once a year event. Football has a season. Baseball has a season.

In “A Christmas Carol,” Charles Dickens got it right with Ebenezer Scrooge’s conversion. Not that he no longer sees Christmas as a “fine time to pick a man’s pockets once a year,” but that he understands its meaning is timeless, and vows to keep it all year long. It would be nice if we could do something similar.

Second, the “War on Christmas.”

Does it strike anybody else besides me as ironic, even hypocritical, that we are waging war over aspects of the traditional birthday of the “Prince of Peace?” It’s as if we’re living the Peter Sellers line from the 1960s movie “Dr. Strangelove.”

“You can’t fight in here, this is the war room!”

Does it really diminish our internal goodwill if we don’t see a Nativity scene everywhere we go? If someone wishes you “Seasons Greetings” rather than “Merry Christmas?”

It’s a good day when you receive any friendly acknowledgement. It’s an opportunity, a door opening to something more meaningful.

Third is a lack of charity. Not the charity of giving to those in need, but the charity extended to the thoughts and actions of others throughout the year.

We are too quick to find fault and assign blame. We rush to judging others based upon the flimsiest of information. We are easily affronted, quick to anger and often over the littlest of supposed slights or disagreements.

How easy it is to forget in celebrating the birth of a cute, lovely baby that the same baby grew up to be a man who asked us how it is we can point out the speck in our neighbors eye “yet ignore the log in your own.”

Finally, we view humility as weakness. And yet, as Christians, we celebrate the birth of the man we proclaim humbled himself by willingly going to his death on a cross — for us.

Are we so prideful, and lately so fearful, that we can’t make the smallest of sacrifices, like taking in refugees from a war-torn region?

These and other things are what I’m thinking about right now. I think of them year round.

I also know I’ve said things like this before. But I believe it, that to keep it relevant and meaningful, like Scrooge, Christmas should be kept year-round.

In closing, I’m not going to say “Merry Christmas,” or “Happy Holidays,” or “Season’s Greetings.” Unfortunately, those have become fighting words.

Instead, I am going to end with one word that sums everything up.

Peace.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].