On Christmas

Merry Christmas! Today is Christmas Day, and I hope that you’ve had a wonderful day celebrating it. However, I wonder how many of us have truly celebrated at all.

When we speak of “celebrating” Christmas, I think we have softened the meaning of that word. For most people, celebrating Christmas is in fact more like observing a holiday. We exchange gifts, eat big meals, spend time with family, decorate things, and may even sing some songs. However, true celebration just doesn’t seem to happen anymore, not unless we’re extremely excited about a present that we got that year.

I think that it’s time we really started celebrating Christmas again—I mean REALLY celebrating. Celebrations involve being extremely excited and joyful. It includes loud songs of joy, praise, and thanksgiving for something that has been done. People don’t care what others think about them at celebrations because they’re too busy celebrating. Most of the time, celebrations are not clean-cut and proper, they are passionate and often disorganized.

When did Christmas become so prim and proper? When, in the famous words of Charlie Brown, did Christmas become “too commercial?” I don’t know, but I know that this Christmas I didn’t really celebrate. I just observed a holiday and its rituals.

We need to truly celebrate the birth of Christ. That means singing as loud as we can. It means telling everyone we see about the joyous occasion that they can be a part of. Celebrating the birth of Christ means we are passionate and thankful about it. It means we literally can throw a party because of what Christ has done!

It’s probably not exactly what your parents had in mind when they hung your stocking over the chimney with care, but then again, Christmas isn’t about stockings.

Christmas is about the birth of our Savior, and that’s something that deserves the biggest celebration that we can put together.