Is Jesus Really the Reason for the Season?

This was one of my earliest posts on The King and His Kingdom, EIGHT years ago. (yikes) But for an 18 year old who had just recently discovered that she didn’t hate writing, it’s not bad. I can definitely see some things I’m tempted to edit out, but I decided to leave it for the most part as I originally wrote it.

“Jesus is the reason for the season.” It’s something we hear a lot this time of year.

But as I look at all the commotion surrounding the holiday, I have to wonder if it all has anything to do with Jesus.

Jesus may be the reason for the original one-day celebration, but Christmas is not just a one-day holiday anymore. It’s a whole season.

Though most people try to wait until after Thanksgiving to start celebrating Christmas, a lot of stores and businesses start putting out Christmas decorations as early as mid-October. There are hundreds of books, movies, and songs dedicated to Christmas.

Yes, there is something special about the atmosphere of the Christmas season – stunning light displays, perfect white snow, crackling fires, and beautiful music – but those things are barely connected to the holiday itself.

I think a lot of the things that we think of as “Christmasy” are more of a celebration of winter, kind of like warm sun, campfires, and sparkling beaches are associated with a summer atmosphere rather than a certain holiday.

So why does all this stuff center around Christmas, and why do we start feeling the Christmas spirit as early as Halloween? I have a completely, uneducated, unresearched theory. In the English class I took last year, [uhh, that would be nine years ago now] one of my assignments was to research and write about how advertising affects our daily lives. It was eye-opening to see how much of our culture is shaped by advertisements.

So my theory is that advertising plays a big part in getting us to think about Christmas several months early.

Think about it. Where is the first place you start hearing about Christmas? Probably in an ad. The day after Thanksgiving is not only when a lot of people start counting down to Christmas, but it’s also the biggest shopping day of the whole year.

Because Christmas is the only holiday that has gift-giving as a major tradition, advertisers take advantage of it and make a big deal out of it more than any other holiday.

This theory isn’t completely my own. A lot of people, Christians especially, often point out how Christmas is so commercialized, and too focused on the gift-giving – and gift-getting – aspect. In an attempt to combat it, we try to point out what Christmas is REALLY about – the birth of Jesus Christ.

But since Christmas is so huge in proportion to other holidays, we end up making the Christmas story huge in proportion to the rest of the Bible.

Except it’s not. Jesus’ birth is important, but it’s not the gospel. It’s only the very beginning of the gospel –chapter one. In fact, two of the four gospels don’t even include it.

The gospel is not a baby in a manger with animals looking at Him and a star shining down. The gospel is a bloody body hanging from a wooden cross as all the wrath of God is poured down onto Him. It’s the Holy Spirit coming into people to make them do things that other people see as crazy – and still doing them even when it gets them tortured and killed.

Yet we barely give any attention to Easter, and have you ever even thought of celebrating Pentecost? Somehow the stories behind those holidays don’t inspire the same peaceful feelings that the Christmas story does.

Everyone likes Christmas because it fits with our comfortable American Christianity. We like the idea of peace on earth, God giving His Son as a gift, the whole picture-perfect nativity scene. It’s warm and fuzzy and fits right in with all the other Christmas things.

And really, there’s nothing wrong with all those things. But we need to stop saying things like “Jesus is the reason for the season” because He’s not. Gifts and food and money and comfort are the reason we have a whole season devoted to this celebration.

But to a Christian, Jesus is the reason for everything. He is the reason for December 26 just as much as the 25 . He is the reason to give, not a few affordable gifts on one day, but to give sacrificially every day. He brings peace, not just Christmas peace, but a deep, abiding peace all year round. His birth, death, and resurrection are the reason to celebrate and worship Him every day of every year for eternity.

I’m not saying we should stop celebrating Christmas, or stop talking about the Christmas story completely. But the next time you start to say “Christmas is all about Jesus,” I hope you stop and at least think about it. Spend the Christmas season with your family and eat lots of Christmas cookies and decorate a tree and give gifts because of Jesus, but then get up the next morning and go back to your everyday life because of Jesus, because He is the reason for every season.