The Christian Grinch

Christmastime is here.  Happiness and cheer.  Are you like me?  Do you look at everyone around you and say, You’re doing it wrong!  Don’t you know it’s not about Santa and reindeer?  It’s bad enough so many people are celebrating the wrong holiday!  But the rest are celebrating the holiday all wrong!  I tell you, I have no patience for “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire” or “Silver Bells” anymore.  They are winter songs, not Christmas songs.  I drive through town and see the main street festooned with banners that say “Joy” and “Peace” and “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Hannukah” and I think, what about Jesus?  

And I realized something.  I am a Christian Grinch.  I have stolen Christmas from myself.  Instead of celebrating Peace and Love and Joy to the World and the Silent Night, I sit here and I think, “How I hate the Whos!  Every Who down in Whoville!”

If my neighbor hangs up lights and fills half his churchgoing for the year on the 24th, and gathers together with his family and exchanges presents, does that make him a bad person?  Does that mean he’s going to Hell?  Here he is, filling the season with love and joy and peace as best he can.  And maybe his favorite song is Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer, perhaps the most un-Christian Christmas song there is.  

I have an on-going argument with a friend over whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie.  In my mind, any movie that features office sex, people snorting cocaine, an office building blowing up and dozens of people dying is not a Christmas movie.  In his mind, they sing Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree and say “Merry Christmas” and it takes place at this time of the year.  No, in actuality, he suggests that John McLain's presence at the party is a miracle, that he saves everyone by being willing to sacrifice himself.  By my definition, the only “Christmas movie” is The Nativity, which is a thoroughly mediocre movie.  And the only TV Christmas special is Charlie Brown’s, because at least Linus tells us what Christmas is all about, and they sing Hark the Herald.  So living by my definition is like living on the Island of Broken Toys.

I hope you are not like me.  Because this attitude I have is not just in regards to celebrating Christmas wrong.  Which they are.  It’s about how to be a “good Christian”.  And I’m a Grinch there too.  If I’m being fair to myself, it’s not that I am convinced I am right and they’re all wrong.  I know the sin I have and continue to do as well as the right I continue to not do.  But I am convinced there is something that is Right and True, or Someone who is.  And I worry that most people either don’t know, believe that Truth is all relative, don’t care to even seek the Truth, or perhaps worst of all, believe they have it, when their lives are full of “bad fruit” - hatred, unforgiveness and bigotry: of Justice without Mercy.  Others abound in cheap grace, freedom to do whatever; of Mercy without Justice. But our Lord is perfectly Just and perfectly Merciful, and full of Grace, abounding in gifts that I definitely do not deserve.

I want to have the grace to say “Happy Holidays”, to sing “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” and to enjoy Die Hard (even if it is NOT a Christmas movie!).  Lord, please soften my heart.  Let it grow three sizes this day.