Xmas

It's late November and already I am fed up with Christmas!
The shops are full of Xmas gifts and adverts on TV and Radio gushingly exhort us to spend our cash on stuff that will be forgotten by January the first. Countless others tell us where to get the finance to pay for it, or to clear up the debts left by last years overspending.
All around folks are putting decorations on their houses. Some spending several thousand pounds to place plastic santas and reindeer, with snowmen and other creatures lit up and moving all around. All this to raise money for charity. Nothing to do with attention seeking eh?
Giving the cost of the lights and the electric to run them would raise more.

Christmas is still several weeks away! Yet we have an abundance of emptiness screaming at us from all around! Buy this and that and happiness will flow through your Xmas time. No it won't! On the contrary Christmas is a time of loneliness for many, and arguments and domestic disputes for far too many others.

Television will soon be full of blonde, brainless, grossly overpaid women, dancing overexitedly onto our screens telling us what a wonderful time we are having. These creatures will gush and yell 'wonderfull time' 'amazing' 'fantastic' and many other empty meaningless words while 'pap' of the worst possible type fills the screen.

Must it be like this?
Christmas is a time when families can get together and have a good time. People need a midwinter break and the hope that soon the nights will get shorter and warm days will return.
But do we need the commercial hype, followed soon after with the emptiness off the morning after? No. Certainly not.

Christians realise that Christmas is a time when the entrance of Jesus into this world is remembered. They know that the actual date of his arrival is not known. But having met him for themselves they know he came, taught his disciples, carried our sin nature to the cross, and by dying left it there. His rising from the dead and sending of the Holy Spirit gives life to those who accept it. They also remember that soon he will return.

The death for us puts this sham Christmas in it's place.
Time I think to drop it and replace it with 'the real thing.'