thoughts on the holiday

As it is now Christmas season I have been enjoying the downtime, but also contemplating a few things about the holiday.

First, I really do not like most Christmas movies. I have known this for a while, but I have only recently taken the time to figure out why. It's because there are only two or three potential plots to a true Christmas movie and they almost always attempt to compensate for a lack of quality with saccharine-sweet sentimentality.

Second, I wonder if the appeal of the holiday to some people is that Christ is depicted as a baby. We went through a major lights display a few nights ago and I was struck by the number of baby-laying-in-a-manger scenes, even in situations where there were no Mary and Joseph depicted. Kind of like Ricky-Bobby, do a lot of people prefer not to think of Christ the adult if presented with the opportunity to think of him as a baby? If so, this cannot be healthy. There's a reason that the Gospels focus on the adult Jesus far more than the child Jesus.

Third, I think that Easter should be more important than Christmas to Christians. From a practical perspective the resurrection is the fulfillment of the Old Covenant and the initiation of the New Covenant. Easter represents the most important event that ever occurred, and Christmas represents an event that was necessary for the resurrection to occur. That said, Christmas is the more important in our culture because of the consumer aspect and because it conveniently splits the school year in two. I don't really see this as a soapbox issue for me, so I'll drop that specific issue here.

Fourth, while I'm on the topic, Christmas and Easter sermons are generally the worst sermons of the year. You do not have to have attended church at all to know the stories of Christ's birth, death, and resurrection. These are the foundation of the Christian faith, but they are also milk rather than meat. A sermon should teach the congregation something that they do not know or do not know well. It is frankly hard to do that when your source text is Matthew 1-2 or Luke 1-2, which everyone in the congregation has heard taught one month out of every year for their entire lives.

Fifth, the above points made, the idea behind the virgin birth and Jesus' very existence on this earth is pretty spectacular. The unpredictability of everything Jesus did and how he fulfilled the Law, even when so much of how this would go down was prophesied, should give pause to people who read prophesies into modern-day events. The methods that God uses to do what He is going to do are unpredictable even when God has provided prophesy about what is going to happen, because God operates more spectacularly than we can imagine.

Sixth, buying and wrapping gifts for the holidays is the most inefficient means of giving someone else something ever dreamed up by mankind. I know that is part of the value of giving and receiving gifts to many people, the knowledge that it requires some effort. In an already busy season, though, is it wrong to long for some efficiency?

One very good thing about the holiday is that I usually take quite a bit of vacation time. I do enjoy taking multiple weeks off from work. It provides a nice way to de-stress. No doubt about that.