Christmas is pretty good you know. It isn’t all celebration. It is deeply religious. It has “Jesus” written all over it in our western world … It really is something beyond “Rocking around the Christmas Tree” or “I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”

Christmas and its spirit goes beyond too much liquor or Black Friday. It’s  above all of that and remains, at its core, a religious festival where the major theme is the ultimate theme of many faiths and that’s the search for  peace on all levels. 

You will know that we have in the past observed on these pages the solid idea that people are nicer to one another at Christmas. I maintain that when the clerk in the store or the man or woman at the chip shop or the bartender at the pub says “Merry Christmas” it’s true that they mean it. 

A Christmas Carol

You can ask the cops and they will tell you even the business of crime takes a bit of a holiday at Christmas. There will always be crimes of passion fueled by too much drink, but nobody plans a robbery for Christ’s birthday. The robbers are all home for Christmas.  

It’s still a season, even in this 21st century, that’s very spiritual. It’s a time of celebration, but also a period of self-examination as in recollection of past behaviours thrown in through the ghost of Christmas past. It’s a look at previous events to show us who we were and who we are and who we might be. Everyone has a favourite Christmas or a worst Christmas tucked away in our memory banks. 

Consider if you will today the various forms of A Christmas Carol from Dickens to Bill Murray’s Scrooged to Alistair Sim to George C. Scott and on through to Mickey’s Christmas Carol. It isn’t a story from the Bible, but it isn’t far off.   

Belief and judgment

Thus it is that Christmas is a story of belief and judgment as in “naughty or nice” and more than anything else; redemption. That’s a very Christian thought. Rewards thrown in (presents) or punishment inflicted (a lump of coal) by a god-like  creature (Santa) who circles the earth in a sleigh performing ritual miracles of gift giving without boundary or limit. It’s all a reflection of the Christian concept of being saved or lost and of having judgment passed on us for all eternity by virtue of our behaviour towards others. 

Merry Christmas!

That’s part of The Christmas Story. It always has been. It’s told in different forms, but none better than the notion of Christmas as told through a couple of thousand years. 

I almost forgot. Be thou well this happy holy season.  Merry Christmas!