Online Only: Cotton-candy Christmas

Call me Scrooge, but I'm just about sick of smarm. American culture is saturated with hollow happiness and empty smiles. The facade of every advertisement tells us our wealth will make us happy, but only if we use that wealth to buy Product W from heartless Corporation XYZ. The hollow ringing of our spiritual emptiness is most deafening in the first three weeks of December, when we all bustle about, burning our wealth in an annual attempt to make the American Dream come true: Maybe this will be the year that I can finally buy happiness.\nOf course, we know we can't buy happiness. Yet we're somehow surprised when, after weeks of shopping, it doesn't appear hiding behind the next PlayStation. So we get discouraged.\nBut the finely tuned American economic machine doesn't let that disappointment get us down. Just pop in "A Charlie Brown Christmas" or "It's a Wonderful Life" to be reminded of "the true meaning of Christmas." Invariably, this nebulous "true meaning" has something to do with being grateful, not being selfish or spending time with your family -- all while still spending that fat year-end bonus to buoy the economy.\nI would never suggest that we should all be more ungrateful and selfish, but all of this sugar-coated nonsense is more nauseating than chugging a quart of eggnog. Gifts and "family time" have nothing to do with Christmas. Yes, they're nice, but if that's where our messianic merriment ends, the holiday is as empty as an inflatable lawn ornament.\nThe boundless joy of Christmas is incomprehensible without understanding the love of Easter: that God didn't abandon his creation to wallow in our misery but loves us enough to die for us. Jesus' suffering for us only began at Christmas and climaxed with his death.\nThe old Christmas carols overflow with this message of boundless love. I used to think "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" was just another sugar-coated feel-good song. Then I read the lyrics. \nThey say Jesus was "born that man no more may die, born to raise the sons of Earth, born to give them second birth" and that through Christ "God and sinners (are) reconciled." This promised joy is not found in a Wal-Mart shopping cart, but in Christ's death and resurrection, reconciling us to God.\nOne of my favorite carols implores Emmanuel -- a title for Jesus meaning "God with us" -- to come and "free thine own from Satan's tyranny; from depths of hell thy people save, and give them victory over the grave." The carol depicts us as a band of refugees that "mourns in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appears." Exiled from God's presence by our sin, we can only be restored by his unmerited favor.\nSo Christmas actually is about gratitude, selflessness and love, but it isn't the empty tokens of love wrapped up under a dead conifer. It's the selfless love of immortal God dying for his creation. For that, we're grateful.\nIsn't that a bit more substantive than "Jingle Bell Rock"?