“Let’s Hear the Christmas Story All the Year Around” from the December 26, 1961 Door County Advocate
Let’s Hear the Christmas Story All the Year Around
By JIM ROBERTSON
The tragedy of Christmas is the suddenness with which it ends.
This is only the day after Christmas and yet store windows are being emptied of their holiday decorations.
It is only the day after Christmas and radio and television stations are already silent of their Christmas music.
Christmas decorations still line the city streets and beautify home fronts, but already they seem out of place. Christmas trees still sparkle in the homes, but already their short lives seem spent.
Summing it all up is the remark that must have been heard in every home on Christmas day, “all this fuss and now it’s over already.”
And yet the big complaint during the Christmas shopping season — from Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve — stems from the growing dissatisfaction and even disgust with the commercialism, the brashness and even the cheapness that seems to have been bestowed upon Christmas.
But how long does this commercialism, this cheapness last? From Thanksgiving to Christmas, hardly more than a month. And yet the voice of Christianity cries out that we are losing the true meaning of Christmas, the birth of a savior.
But if this is Christianity’s voice, then it is a weak, defensive voice. If Christmas must have its commercial side, and this seems inevitable, then let the hucksters, the merchants and the children have the month before Christmas to advertise their wares and to think of Santa Clans.
What is left? Eleven long months in which the churches, the clergy and yes, every Christian, can proclaim the glad tidings of great joy.
After all, this is the story of Christmas: the story of sinful man’s redemption by a saviour. It is a story that Christianity must not confine only to the Christmas season, amid the materialistic chants of radio, television and newspaper. It is a story that must be bannered all 12 months of the year. Then it will be a story that can not and will not be swallowed up by worldly materialism at Christmas.
Courtesy of the Door County Library Newspaper Archive
Articles by Jim Robertson
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Articles about Christmas
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