Even before the Woke world tried to trash “Merry Christmas” for “Happy Holidays,” there was much talk of “keeping Christ in Christmas.” My question, however, is whether he has ever been in it.
I am afraid that even at my ripe old age and after a half-century as a confessing Christian, I still do not know how to negotiate Christmas. The phrase “Merry Christmas” reminds me more of Santa Claus than the holy family, but I confess to having a hard time coming up with an alternative.
When spoken, “merry Christmas” is pronounced “merry krissmess,” and the sound “Christ,” let alone “Jesus,” is not heard. And while the word Christ does appear in the written “Christmas,” the whole is difficult for me as a Reformed Christian to accept, coming as it does from “Christ Mass,” which is Roman Catholic. While I am a Reformed Christian and I would not, as the famous Reformed ruler of England Oliver Cromwell did, forbid Catholics from celebrating those occasions, I have no room for the Christ Mass, the Michael Mass, or any of the other masses.
So if not “Merry Christmas,” then what? Thinking that navidad means “nativity,” I have considered “Feliz Navidad” as a likely alternative, but (at least according to my online sources) Navidad seems to be a proper noun that refers to the fiesta, the celebration, not to the original event, which would be signified by nacimiento.
So I seem to be stuck with “merry krissmess,” Santa Claus (who, like Christ, sees us when we’re sleeping and knows when we’re awake and if we’ve been bad or good) and all.
So why is this important enough to rant about?
Well, in the recently passed season of the celebration of Christ’s birth, one of the phrases often heard was “peace on earth.” This phrase is an expression of a wish, not an accurate description of the present situation, but the expression rings hollow, given that part of the present situation that that phrase does not describe is our tax money going for over a year to pay the Israeli government to destroy Christian churches—more importantly the people than the buildings—in Gaza and the West Bank, and lately now even in Syria.
In the former case, Christians who had been living under the thumb of Palestinian Islam for decades have been killed, maimed, bereaved, or driven out of their homes by American-financed bombs, and the everyday persecution they have been living under has likely increased as a result of the suffering of their Muslim neighbors. In the latter case, Christians who had been protected by Syria’s otherwise secular kleptocracy are now at the mercy of jihadists whose recent past includes beheading those who deviate from their strict interpretation of Islamic law.
The media has no reason to describe the situation as other than the state of Israel defending itself, but one would hope that American Christians would have a different take on it, viewing it as they should through a biblical lens. But what acknowledgment of our fellow believers’ suffering has there been among those who finance it? I attended four different churches over four Sundays during the krissmess season and heard not a syllable even mentioning them, let alone praying for them. It was as if they didn’t exist. Yes, it’s wonderful that Jesus came for us and died for us, and it’s great that we confess and turn from our sin, but that sin works itself out in specific sins, which we don’t seem to acknowledge. I would suggest that one of those sins is the apparent enthusiasm (or disinterest) with which the American church pays the Israelis to cause our fellow Christians to endure horrific suffering.
So where is Christ this krissmess? Maybe the attempted move to “Happy Holidays” was God’s way of showing American evangelicalism that Christ has not been in krissmess for a long time. We can’t keep him in something he’s not in to begin with.
