It is Christmas time again.  A wonderful time of year, at least for Christians ✝️  around the world 🌎.  

But what is the meaning of Christmas?  Not just an official definition, but what is the perception of Christmas, which in some cases, can be taken as meaning opening presents for kids, lighting and decorations, Santa Claus, or mass consumerism.

As a Christian, Christmas for me means the birth of Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior. The “Christmas holiday” is a day set aside to symbolize and recognize the birth of my Lord and Savior.

For the tradition of gift giving at Christmas, in my mind and definition of Christmas, it is meant to symbolize the Gift that GOD gave to man, His ONLY Begotten Son. The gift of life that His Son gave when he sacrificed His life for all of mankind, giving us (us being sinful man) the chance at everlasting life.

The holidays, as it is celebrated here in America, is not my favorite holiday, from a celebratory standpoint. Why? Because it is a holiday that has been corrupted and subverted into a mass consumer exercise, designed to keep people separated from revenue and totally connected to debt. It is a holiday where people feel pressured or guilted into spending vast amounts of money on stuff that they sometimes cannot afford to meet some perceived perception of what they have to do for friends, family, and others.

Christmas is the only holiday that I witness that carries a stigma or burden on people when they cannot give things to children or others that meet a level of perceived equality of what others have or have been gifted.

What makes this stand out for me is that the “Christ” has been removed from Christmas. Many jobs and people are barred from saying “Merry Christmas” and are relegated to saying “Happy Holidays” because it may offend someone. Funny. No one is offended by Santa Claus.

Furthermore, most parents and people in various societies around the world take honesty as something to be valued and as a honorable character trait. But during Christmas, these same people in society will go along with the mass Santa Claus lie, even to the point that it makes the news as sort of a “wink, wink..” segment (see attached video clip). We lie to our children from an early age, having them believe in something that is NOT real, only later to tell them, “oh, Santa isn’t real, we just told you that to make the holiday fun…” while hypercritically chastising the same child for lying to them. If you start with lies…well…

Christmas. The true meaning of Christmas. What does Christmas mean to you?