Don't Keep Christ in Christmas

This one is for the parents.

With so much to do this time of year, and so many opportunities for our kids to get the wrong idea about Christmas, many Christians have made a concerted effort to keep Jesus as a central focus during this season.  We wear buttons that say “Keep CHRIST in CHRISTmas,” and we verbally berate anyone who dares to wish us a “happy holidays.”  And since our culture has a tendency to focus on Santa and presents and what our kids want for Christmas, we make it a point to remind them that the real gift of Christmas is the baby Jesus, even though they secretly know it’s an Xbox One.  Many of us have made a very big deal over keeping Christ in Christmas for our children.

And this is bad.

The problem with “keeping Christ in Christmas” is that it can actually produce the opposite result in their lives than what we intend if we go about it the wrong way.  Often, what it teaches our children is that there is a special time of year where we focus on Jesus and giving back, and the rest of the year is all about us.  January through November centers on sports games and piano lessons and dance practice and football and jobs after school and getting a date to homecoming and not being the only kid in school without a cell phone.  Then Jesus gets a month at the end and the whole things starts all over again.

A lot of our lives center around our schedules, and church always seems to be put on the back burner.  It’s something to be done if there isn’t a conflict with anything else in the schedule or if we aren’t too tired to get up because of the long drive back from whatever road game or event we had on Saturday.  Then, when Christmas rolls around, we make sure to keep Christ in it.  But if we fail to keep Christ in the other eleven months of the year our children will grow up selfish and entitled, believing that most of the year is still about them.

I believe that the best way to honor Christ is not to keep Him in Christmas, but rather to make Him central to every part of your life and your family’s life.

But maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe we should just keep wearing our buttons.