Once again the Christmas season is upon us. COVID 19 and the media and government's response to it has made this a strange year and now at Christmas time, business are beginning to shut down again. Here in Texas there are still beautiful lights and decorations to be seen, but in spite of the beautiful Christmas displays, there is an unmistakable general joylessness everywhere. Last night I drove through the Vitruvian lights display in Addison, Texas and I waited in line behind a significant number of visitors waiting to see trees wrapped all the way to the tips in various colors of amazing Christmas lights. Masked families were getting out of their cars to walk down and see the lighted trees reflecting gorgeous colors in the creek. I cannot help but wonder how many of these families were there just to see something beautiful at the end of a long and tiresome year. Even most of those who grew up in church no longer apply Christianity to their lives in any meaningful way--they may talk to their children about the birth of baby Jesus on Christmas day, but basically they don't apply His teachings to their lives in any significant way. Christmas celebrations are really an interesting comment on a society that is surrounded by Christmas from before Thanksgiving until January 2 but that has forgotten the meaning behind the celebration.
The story of Christmas is not the story of a refugee family fleeing Palestine, nor is it the story of a struggling single mother. The Christmas story is the story of how God fulfilled His promise to save a fallen world by being born as a human, living among us and dying on a cross. Without Easter, Christmas has no meaning and without Christmas, Easter has no victory.
This year, more than any other I have seen in a long time, has left so many of us with a general feeling of hopelessness. We are being promised a "dark winter" by the media and the incoming administration. We have a thread of hope to hang on to the Senate next month--if we lose that we pretty much guaranteed a socialist country in the next two years. We have seen riots and looting in our cities, a breakdown in law and order and calls to defund the police. Looking into 2021, there does not seem to be much basis for hope but that might be because we have focused our hope on the wrong things as a society.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her holiday series, Kinsman, is available in paperback and on Kindle. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
