Barney Zwartz wrote a great article about Christmas Here are some quotes, go read it all here.
My plea is to keep some spiritual relevance in Christmas, for believer and atheist alike. For Christians, Christmas is pre-eminently about grace, the incarnation, God entering human history to redeem and restore. It marks something transcendent and sacred. But secular people, too, are spiritual, and they too are impoverished in the absence of anything transcendent and sacred. They will not find it in a festival to Mammon.
The tragedy is that for so many people Christmas has become an ordeal, and its hopes and expectations have been postponed to the holiday that begins the day after.
You can be spiritual without religious belief, but you can't be spiritual if you are enmeshed in the joyless, stressful pursuit of a mirage. Just watch the desperate faces of shoppers in the last few days before Christmas, the pressure parents feel to do something exceptional. When did the mark of how much you love someone become how much you spent on them?
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