We don’t want the cozy Christmas story besmirched by…tawdry human and political realities.
So we get youngsters to perform our nativity plays. We talk about how magical this season is. We say “Christmas is really for the children.” How … convenient.
But that’s not all you find, when you sit in a market square in Delhi and see adults performing the Christmas story in an open-air nativity play. There’s more. You see that Christmas is about people struggling, not just politically, but personally. Everywhere you look in the Christmas story you see people clinging on with their fingertips to life, to sanity, to respectability, to hope.
Read it all (my emphasis).
Yes, THANK YOU! I think this is what we need and what we’ve lost. It’s the thing that’s allowed our second most important holy day to become sappy and taken over by Santa Claus and toys. Like the author, I’m not suggesting that little kids shouldn’t be a part of Christmas but I do believe, as he said, that adults need to take Advent and Christmastide more seriously and be active as adults in their own reflections and spiritual preparation.
I’m tired of Christmas being mainly “cute.”