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Merry Christmas!
There, it’s officially in print and online for anyone to praise or criticize, to hold up as an example of “keeping Christ in Christmas” or to vilify as an utterly un-PC bias toward one religion.
Except it is intended as neither. And a critical component of the celebration of Christmas — or of any holiday, holy day, birthday or even mortgage-burning day — is intent.
If you intended your gifts to be reminders that this marks the birth of the Christian savior, then amen and hallelujah! If you intended them as physical signs of deeply felt family bonds, may they forge ever tighter. If you intended them as gags to evoke adult guffaws, here’s hoping for some robust hardy har-hars.
If you intended them as a surge of energy to charge up the beaming smiles and bright eyes of beloved children, more power to you (and them).
And if you put no faith in the faith behind the occasion, but put great value in the generosity and joy it embodies, this nog’s for you. May your atheistic or agnostic or non-Christian hearth and home be of warm thoughts and peaceful hearts now and through the coming year.
Yes, Virginia, Christmas is a religious holy day for many; And yes, it is a national holiday; And yes, it is celebrated worldwide in countless permutations with an earthly host of time-honored traditions, relished recipes, nostalgic aromas, singular songs and distinctive decor.
And yes, Santa Claus is as real as the giddy anticipation that kept toddlers awake, peeking down the stairs for a glimpse of the jolly old man, until their peepers could peep no more.
But the reason Christmas is so big, so ubiquitous and so easily recognized wherever it occurs is not, as the humbuggers would have you believe, solely due to crass commercialism. Yes retail giants and money grubbers of every ilk have mastered the exploitation of the season, that’s what they do. But they succeed because this holiday is bigger than they are. It is capacious enough to absorb their avarice without losing its essence.
At its heart, Christmas transcends. It embodies something we cannot truly put into words, something better, something important, something priceless precisely because it is more than the sum of its parts, more than the greeting card sentiments, more than the words exchanged with gifts and toasts proclaimed with a shot of mulled wine, warmed cider, “boilo” or whatever fills your cup of good cheer.
Today is about what’s best in us, what’s best in our lives — present, past and future. It is about not only being grateful for gifts, but giving with gratitude. It is core qualities of Christianity — love, compassion, appreciation, joy in what you have and whom you know — made universal. It succeeds because those core qualities are not exclusive to Christians, they can be shared by any.
Christmas transcends. Regardless of where and what you are, it’s a chance to see and feel something more, something better.
And with that intent:
Merry Christmas.