Bah Humbug - All the right reasons for the season

Current! in Carmel - #5 – Bah Humbug
Spirituality column – Dec. 12, 2006

A Season for the Reason: The Right Kind of Bah Humbug
By Bob Walters

My dear friend George – quite likely the most learned and tested Christian I will ever know – deeply, sincerely and thoughtfully loathes Christmas.

He is to the highest degree a celebrant of God’s gift of the incarnation of Christ – God become man for the ultimate hope and salvation of mankind (see John 1:14, the absolute reason for the season). But he has no enthusiasm whatsoever for the commercial festival that is Christmas.

I’m listening to Christmas music as I write this, so I am not a Holiday scold. I also know better than to say “Merry Christmas” to George, a phrase that only intensifies this miserable season for him. He celebrates the reason, Christ ... not the season.

Many Christians are at least a bit squeamish, properly, at how the religious joy of Christmas is overrun by its commercial manifestation. Truly, very little of our annual Christmas experience withstands much scrutiny of either theology or history.

But I would rate the tradition of our Christmas celebration right near the top – I think for better but some would say for worse – as an expression of our Western cultural perspective of our relationship with God and with each other.

Certainly, Christmas means different things to different people, but it does mean something to almost everybody, and it creates a wider common community than any other Western thing I can think of.

Perhaps the brilliance of Christmas is its universal appeal. There may be a billion Chinese who don’t care (although there are millions who do), and another couple billion Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and third-worlders who aren’t waiting for Santa, but this Christmas season of hope, where it reaches, certainly defines who we are spiritually and who we aspire to be.

As the rest of us enjoy the wonder of the Holy Spirit (you can call it the Christmas Spirit if you want) these next couple of weeks of the season, I’m comforted knowing that George is a first-rate keeper of the flame for the right Reason.

Carmel resident Bob Walters can be contacted at rlwcom@aol.com.