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Merry Christmas

Today is the traditional celebration of Christ's birthday, so Merry Christmas. Let's forget the cultural wars, at least for a day.

Most Americans, even those who do not consider themselves devout or even Christians, enjoy the holiday in their own way. Whatever our beliefs, the spirit of Christmas has come to epitomize the best of human nature: kindness, generosity, peaceful coexistence.

Some will discover its meaning in a church or soup kitchen, others around the family Christmas tree loaded with presents. Even in China, a mostly atheistic and repressive society, young people celebrate Christmas by focusing on personal relationships and romance because their other major holidays stress family togetherness. They recognize the redemptive quality of an otherwise foreign concept.

So even beyond its religious significance, Christmas can stir the heart and mind. Perhaps it is a brief glimpse of our higher potential that is otherwise obscured by the fog of everyday toil and cruelty.

Charles Dickens captured that seemingly ineffable feeling in his classic story of the season, A Christmas Carol. After his awakening, Ebenezer Scrooge "went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted the children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows; and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed that any walk - that anything - could give him so much happiness."

Call it Christ's love, Christmas joy or holiday spirit, we are in need of some of that happiness. It won't hurt us to put aside rancor and strife for a day. In fact, it might do us some good.

[Last modified December 23, 2005, 23:40:04]