CKNW Editorial
for December 20, 2001

Not long ago I received an interesting email from a listener who hates Christmas and blames Christians for cramming the festival down the throats of society. This interested me because usually the complaint is from Christians who lament the fact that the holiday has been hijacked by non-Christians and made into a commercial caricature of their holy day.

There are other points of view - some Christians celebrate on January 6^th and get to buy their presents during the giant post holiday sales …while to many the fun is really over on Christmas Eve.

Unquestionably the season is a very hard one for a lot of people. As Robyn Jeffries of the Greater Vancouver Crisis Centre told us yesterday, the volume of calls this time of the year is enormous and most have to do with loneliness. This loneliness is often compounded by loss - a break-up of a relationship or a divorce or a death ... perhaps the loss of old friends or even a pet can turn what for so many is a season of jollity into one of misery.

Undoubtedly, as a society, through commercial interests we have made it tough for a lot of people. Our movies and TV shows tend to show happy, nuclear families with all parents, grandparents, children and pets alive and well. Presents costing what would be a good month’s wages to many are advertised as if everyone had that kind of money in their hip pocket. We have raised expectations of many and as a caller wisely observed yesterday have created a competitive atmosphere that makes us often rude to one another in malls and may bring to the fore the great unhappiness that naturally goes hand and hand with envy.

It's a great time for family fights. Who eats dinner where, what do we do when Uncle Charlie gets drunk as usual and how do we keep Grandma, after a couple of sherries, reminding Grampa in graphic terms of past indiscretions.

It's a time when the poor feel much poorer and the well to do make an annual move towards a chilling financial crunch in January when the bills arrive.

Then there's Santa. Is this simply a harmless fantasy - I think it is – or does it create an unreality that is harmful to children, especially when they find out that their parents have not been telling them the truth.

There are social pluses, of course. We concentrate on the disadvantaged as Sally Anns stand on street corners and people pour out their hearts and money to charities like the Orphan's Fund. We are, despite some glaring  exceptions, kinder to one another. We forgive trespasses against us for at least one day plus the days leading up to Christmas. And without Christmas and what has now become nauseatingly called Boxing Week, many businesses employing thousands of people could not survive.

As a Christian, do I bear responsibility for the dark side of Christmas?

I plead not guilty at least in my capacity as a Christian. As a greedy mortal, which I am much of the time, the answer is yes. To the Christian, Christmas isn't even the most holy of days - that distinction belongs to Easter. In fact, Christmas wasn't even that big a deal until Victorian times when Prince Albert brought the Christmas tree to Britain, hence North America, from Germany.

What happened, I think, was the exposing of a complicated public nerve. In Northern climes, there was a need to bring light into the wet or snowy season. There was a sense of a need, at the end of the year, to make amends … to clean the slate without having to go to the dangerous trouble of apologizing to all we have wronged.

The Christmas message of the gifts of the Magi and the notion of peace on earth was serendipitously appropriate to the dankness of the season and the need to love and be loved.

As Dickens said in another context, it's the best of times, it's the worst of times. But to a large degree it's what we make it to be. The important thing is that it's clearly here to stay and that means, I think, that all of us should examine Christmas and all that surrounds it and consider what we do critically. As a Christian I don't ask the society I live in to put Christ back into Christmas - He's been too long gone for that. Christians, of course, should remember their Saviour and the story of his birth - only told in one of the gospels incidentally - but for everyone else the season is simply the Great Winter Festival. And that should be enough if we learn to curb our excesses and remember those for whom this most sentimental of times brings back sad memories … a time that reminds them of personal circumstances they would like to be able to change.

As a Christian I would only add this suggestion - and it is to me and all other Christians as well as those who have other faiths or not at all.

Christ's message is one with which we all can surely agree .. Love thy neighbour as yourself which, of course is the recipe for peace.
If all of us would pause for just a moment and think on that – especially during the hot and heavy times - Christmas would be a much better day for everyone.

And that would be very nice indeed