WHAT IF THEY CANCELLED CHRISTMAS?

   They won’t, of course. The Powers Who Are, whoever they are, would never, ever cancel Christmas. What would we do from Halloween until after all the After Christmas Sales? The world’s economy would take a nosedive. Heaven forbid! Or what if Christmas became just like Easter, a day so downplayed that if it were not for cards, candy and lamb, it would be no different than any other Sunday of the year? No, as long as there is commerce, there will be Christmas.

   This is not to bewail and bemoan what has become of Christmas because The Powers Who Are do not control Christmas. They may have blackmailed some merchants into emphasizing the word “Christmas” instead of “Holiday”, but that did not alter the truth that Christmas for all intents and purposes for most people, especially the merchants and The Powers Who Are, is a holiday and not a holyday. The holiday can be cancelled. The holyday cannot.

   So They can cancel the holiday. We will celebrate the holyday. We will celebrate it, much to The Powers’ delight, by giving and receiving material gifts, tangible signs of what this holyday is all about, namely, God’s love for us which we manifest by our love for another, for others. Yet, as limited as my observation honestly is, I would assert that we holyday celebrators are altering the manner in which we are demonstrating our love, altering it in such a way as to make the secular holiday almost into a holyday.

   What we are doing is giving material gifts in the name of those we love to those who truly need to receive those gifts. Each of our daughters has told us that the best gift they received from us last year, and I am sure will be this year, was the one we gave in each of their names to those in need in our community and in our world. I have been the recipient of many such gifts and I am thankful. They make Christmas truly a holyday.

   For many, many people, and not just The Powers Who Are, Christmas is a once-a-year holiday. For us, for you and for me, Christmas is an every-day-in-the-year holyday that we celebrate once a year but which we try to live out every day of the year. We live it out not only in gift-giving but, even more importantly, in the daily giving of our time and talents whenever and wherever they are needed.

   Christmas, the real meaning of Christmas, cannot be cancelled. It can only be lived or not lived. The truth is that we choose to live it by giving ourselves, of ourselves, in some very secular and some very sacred ways. And it is in our living out the meaning of this holyday that we celebrate it.

   May our celebration of Christmas this year be joyful and deep. May the gifts we give and the gifts we receive remind us of God’s Gift to us. May that Gift be a daily reminder that the greatest gift we can ever give to another is the gift of ourselves in whatever way that gift may be needed at that moment in time. May we never forget that the real meaning of Christmas is the giving of our love every day of the year so that we make every day a holyday, make every day Christmas. May it never be cancelled, at least not by us.                WJP