{"id":8633,"date":"2014-11-20T11:26:11","date_gmt":"2014-11-20T16:26:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/?p=8633"},"modified":"2014-11-20T12:09:45","modified_gmt":"2014-11-20T17:09:45","slug":"killing-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/killing-christmas\/","title":{"rendered":"Killing Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Killing Christmas<\/strong><\/h1>\n

On the second day of November I walked into a local store and noticed the Halloween aisle was now the Christmas aisle. All the lights and baubles of Christmas \u2013 all lit up and sparkly \u2013 as if Christmas were only a few days away. I said to myself \u2013 It seems Christmas starts earlier and earlier every year. I paid for my purchases (no Christmas things, mind you) and left the store. And walked to my car, started it up and flipped through some radio stations.<\/p>\n

Guess what? On this, the second day of November, I found a radio station playing 100% Christmas music 24 hours a day, seven days a week until the day after Christmas. I\u2019m not a mathematician but November second is fifty-one days before Christmas \u2013 that\u2019s over seven weeks.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t get it. When I was a kid we put up our Christmas tree a week before Christmas. The stores didn’t have Christmas decorations until after Thanksgiving. \u00a0There was no Christmas music wafting through the city streets and stores until about two weeks prior to Christmas.\u00a0 Being a kid I remember Christmas as a magical time, a short time that came and went every year so quickly. Our Christmas tree was up for only two weeks \u2013 the week before Christmas though New Year\u2019s Day.<\/p>\n

What makes things valuable is their rarity. If we all celebrated our birthdays starting seven weeks before, by the time our birthday actually arrived it would be almost meaningless.<\/p>\n

I really feel badly for the children growing up in this era of greed, instantaneous communications, lack of privacy, and instant gratification. We\u2019re killing Christmas. Before long, Halloween and Christmas will be one long combined holiday starting in early October. I used to think I would not live long enough to see Halloween \u2013 a pagan holiday \u2013 merged with Christmas, a Christian holiday.<\/p>\n

We’ve taken Christ out of Christmas and merged it with witches, brooms, ghosts and goblins, so now we\u00a0 have one pagan holiday sliding into a another \u2013 or so it seems. We\u2019re on the road to perdition and most refuse to see the warning signs or even so much as give a thought to what\u2019s happening to our culture and our society.<\/p>\n

And I don\u2019t care if the 25th<\/sup> of December was a date once used by pagans to celebrate the winter solstice. No one knows, for sure, the real date of the birth of Jesus. December 25th<\/sup> is the day that was chosen for Christians to celebrate the birth of Christ and\u00a0twenty-fifth day of December is as good a day as any other.<\/p>\n

Whether you believe in Christ, or Christianity, or whether or not you’ve never set foot in a church, the birth of Jesus is an important and an historical event. Those who don\u2019t believe should respect the ones who do. I respect other religions\u2019 right to exist, to celebrate holidays and traditions as they wish. But the world has taken the birthday of Jesus and turned it into a seven-week-long sales event. And it\u2019s killing Christmas for the kids as well as for parents and grandparents.<\/p>\n

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have nothing to do with Christmas or Jesus and everything to do with money. Unfortunately, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become as much of a \u201cChristmas\u201d tradition as holiday lights and Santa Claus.<\/p>\n

Now, for the first time Black Friday is being \u201ccelebrated\u201d every Friday starting six weeks before Christmas \u2013 and the name of the god that black Friday honors is named Greed. When the \u201creal\u201d Black Friday comes \u2013 the day after American Thanksgiving \u2013 people will still crush each other trying to get a TV set, computer, or tablet at some ridiculously low price. And if this year is like previous years, some people are going to be injured or killed in the store stampedes that will surely occur the minute the stores\u2019 doors open for business on the \u201creal\u201d Black Friday \u2013 sacrifices all to the god named Greed.<\/p>\n

The meaning of Christmas has been buried under a mountain of cash and credit card receipts. It has been lost and it is downing in an ocean of materialism. You would think enough people would cry out \u2013 \u201cEnough is enough \u2013 we are angry and we\u2019re not going to stand by and watch as the god named Greed kills Christmas.\u201d It\u2019s too bad that that will never happen. It will never happen because the world has changed so much, and the very thing I\u2019ve loved so much, for so many years \u2013 technology is exacerbating the problem and speeding it up.<\/p>\n

Parents want to be their kids\u2019 friends instead of parents. They\u2019re kids with money and sex drives \u2013 they\u2019re not adults. It\u2019s all about money and accumulating wealth and material things \u2013 it\u2019s no wonder our society get more and more soulless every year.<\/p>\n

I hope I won\u2019t be around to see Halloween and Christmas merge to become one two-month-long orgy of spending and accumulating things. Of parents trying to buy their own children\u2019s friendship and love by burying them in gifts. \u00a0I\u2019m glad I won\u2019t be around to see what the next generation does to Christmas. I\u2019m glad I won\u2019t be around to see where all this leads. I have a distinct feeling it\u2019s not going to lead to a very good or very nice place.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve killed our privacy; we\u2019ve killed our individualism; we\u2019ve killed our creativity as a society, and now we\u2019ve killed Christmas. We have no one to blame but ourselves. It\u2019s my fault and it\u2019s your fault because we looked the other \u00a0way and we\u2019ve let it happen \u2013 and it\u2019s not like we didn\u2019t see this coming; it didn\u2019t start last week, or last year, it started decades ago and like a river rushing to the precipice of some mighty waterfall, \u00a0we are powerless to stop it.<\/p>\n

I am glad I have the memories of Christmases past. My parents we’re not well off and, if I was lucky, I got two or three gifts. But I can remember the sparsest Christmas were more full of love and loving and Jesus that the Christmases when gifts were so plentiful they filled an entire room and took hours to open. Somehow love and Jesus both got lost in that huge pile of gifts.<\/p>\n

Christmas should be a time for families to gather together and share each other’s company. It should be a time of love and a time for reflecting upon the year almost completed. It should be a time when we remember whose birthday it is we are celebrating and pay honor to Him whether we are Christians or not. Jesus changed the world by bringing light and truth and love into it. \u00a0In the two thousand years since He walked the Earth we’ve done all we can to undo all he did and now we’ve gotten ourselves a mess that I don’t think anyone can clean up.<\/p>\n

We’re killing Christmas, it’s almost dead – it succumbed to greed and lust for things we don’t need, but things we desire. We’re piling up material goods and while our culture’s soul slowly drains away.<\/p>\n

We’re killing Christmas and you and I have watched it happen – and we stood silently by while the god named Greed slowly stole Christmas away from us.<\/p>\n

But, there is hope because we can keep Christmas alive in our own way, in our own lives, in our own hearts, with our own families, by remembering why we celebrate Christmas – and remembering that our family and our friends and our love are not sold anywhere on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, yet they are the greatest gifts of all. \u00a0Love is a gift from the soul, not from some Black Friday special… and\u00a0you don’t even have to wrap it up.<\/p>\n

So while we can’t stop them from killing Christmas, we don’t have to let it die.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Killing Christmas On the second day of November I walked into a local store and noticed the Halloween aisle was now the Christmas aisle. All the lights and baubles of Christmas \u2013 all lit up and sparkly \u2013 as if Christmas were only a few days away. I said to myself \u2013 It seems Christmas starts earlier and\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[228],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8633"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8633"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8641,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8633\/revisions\/8641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}