Why Christmas isn't for kids
My piece at the Los Angeles Times today
Good morning, and Merry Christmas! Just a quick post to share my Christmas piece at the Los Angeles Times:
Why Christmas isn’t for kids
Christmas in the United States is a holiday chiefly for children. It is a season of candy canes and presents, “A Christmas Story” and the Grinch, mall Santas and the exhausted mothers whose valor they steal.
At church we organize children’s pageants and choirs. At home, we hang Advent calendars stuffed with cheap chocolate. Before we had kids, my husband and I never put up more than a Whole Foods mini-tree; now we have a nine-footer so hefty it had to be ratchet-strapped to the banister. “Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow/ Will find it hard to sleep tonight.”
Christmas is for kids, of course. But our culture’s Christmastime focus on children comes with a grave risk: It teaches us that Christmas is small and soft and sweet. It says this is a holiday about a cute baby nuzzled by fuzzy lambs amid fresh hay in a cozy stable that looks suspiciously like 19th-century England.
It lulls us into forgetting that Christmas, fundamentally, is a celebration of God looking at a broken and self-betrayed world and refusing to abandon us to death and desolation. For Christians, Christmas is a holiday about ending the horrors of war, illness, isolation and the infinite ways we are cruel to one another. It is about God sneaking into captured territory via emergency childbirth in a dirty stable to bait evil itself and lure it to its full and final end.
Read the rest here.
And look, even in print!
And joy to your household, the Savior reigns, even now seated above the mess. May the near year bring blessings and wonder at all the Lord is doing.
Grateful for you taking the opportunity to write the truth into the mainstream. We call it the marketplace. Jesus was out there among the masses. He sends us there today. You are doing it. I am encouraged to do it as I have opportunity as well. By the way, I enjoy your writing as a creation. Keep enjoying your kids, the little ones and that big guy too.