-"The Sweater" - What is it about Christmas that makes people think it's appropriate to buy someone a shirt that looks like a pile of technicolor mohair vomit?-Fruitcake
-Standing in line to buy stuff for people that don't really want it, who are also standing in line to buy stuff for you that you don't really want. What if we just spent that time doing something together for someone else who actually needs our help?
-Parents enduring untold stress to "protect" their children from finding out that Santa's not really a part of this whole thing we call reality. Santa's a fun character. Let him be fun, but ask yourself why are you working so hard to maintain a lie?
-"The Sweater Team Photo" - Sorry mom, we don't really want to look like the Partridge family in our matching mohair for the latest Christmas photo op.
-Adults fighting over toys in stores - and (the near tangent) parents desperately seeking "this year's Elmo". Seriously people, your child's Christmas will not be ruined if they don't get the poo-poo pet or PS720 or whatever else "the hot new thing" is supposed to be next year.
-Why no one ever does a Christmas play re-enacting the Revelation 12 account of Jesus' advent? Really, go look it up. This whole Christmas thing isn't just about a baby in a manger and family time and presents and bowl games, it's about the winning salvo in a war much larger than we may imagine.
-Thinking that coercing someone into saying "Merry Christmas" is some kind of victory. We can't expect the world to tell our story. That's our job.
The baby in the manger came for a reason. He had a mission that he passed on to his followers, to be carried out until he comes again. Don't misplace your part in that mission among the tinsel and figgy-pudding.
Love your comment about the Merry Christmas thing. I just had a conversation with someone a couple weeks ago, about how ridiculous it is that we honestly think the biggest problem we have in our culture is that we say happy holidays instead of merry christmas, and how this time of year we Christians sometimes come off worse because we're either mean-spirited and know-it-all about this or sometimes worse that we just seem stupid because we come across that we honestly think if we could just get the term Christmas used everything would be fixed and it would be back to the "It's a Wonderful Life" mentality. Don't get me wrong, i think it's equally stupid that businesses and such think that they are being less offensive by using x-mas and am equally annoyed by the like of Christ in Christmas, just wonder sometimes where all of our frustration and angst is the rest of the year when Christ is left out of everything else.
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