As a general rule, I ignore all things Christmas prior to the day after Thanksgiving, largely because I do not want to contribute to the trend of stores starting their Christmas decorating and sales earlier and earlier each year. However, I wanted to take the time to comment about the Liberty Council and their Naughty or Nice List. For those of you who have lives and don't know what this list is, it is a list of stores to patronize or boycott on the basis of their specific recognition of Christmas.
The first thing I ask myself is this, is this really a hill worth dying over? Is this fight over the recognition of Christmas going to bring more people to Christ or deepen the faith of Christians? Hardly, it is only going to succeed in making us look like petty little busy bodies.
I realize that a large part of the stink is caused by the fact they stand to make a lot of money on people buying gifts for Christmas. Ok, in some ways it would be nice that if they are going to be making money on Christmas it would be nice to have some recognition, but is it necessary? Not really. Local stores stand to make a fair bit of money when Lutherans gather to celebrate Reformation Day, but I really don't care if they have a Reformation Day sale or say "Blessed Reformation Day."
Personally, I don't care if the store I am shopping at acknowledges Christmas or not. The only time I would care is if they claimed to be a Christian business. Not that I honestly care if the business is explicitly Christian or not, I only care to be treated with respect and get a good value. I don't really mind if the stores go for a blanket Happy Holidays, Christians are their only customers. We really do not need to create undo offense to those who do not celebrate Christmas by forcing people to hear or say "Merry Christmas." Those two words aren't going to convert them into Christians, so let's fight the fight worth fighting and preach the Gospel.
We can make use of Holiday Season just as well as we can with "Christmas Season," which by the way for you liturgically ignorant people starts on Dec 25th not the day after Thanksgiving. Advent comes before Christmas and starts either the last Sunday in November or the first Sunday in December depending on the year.
So, why don't we all use the brains God gave us and fight this battle smart by making stands on the things that are truly important.
1 comment:
Indeed, it is much more likely that a non-Christian who was committed to another faith would be alienated or offended by such a greeting than that they would be positively influenced by it. Having grown in a majority Christian society, we already know that Christians are in the majority in the country and we accommodate our lives to your calendar, even sometimes agreeing to work your jobs so that you can celebrate the holiday. "Happy Holidays" is a sign of respect for us, and it doesn't specifically exclude Christmas.
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