Christmas Day, December 25th — the one date Christians chose that Jesus almost certainly wasn’t born on. If the holiday is supposed to celebrate His birthday, we definitely missed the target. Not by hours. By months. Biblical scholars can’t even agree on whether it was April or August. The Bible doesn’t say, and honestly, it doesn’t seem to care.
Yet here we are, three days before Christmas, and millions, maybe billions, of people are gearing up to celebrate the birth of a man who owned absolutely nothing, preached generosity, and told the wealthy to give their possessions away. And we celebrate Him by… buying more possessions. Lots of them. Wrapped in glittery paper from Wal Marts seasonal aisle.
It’s the kind of contradiction only religion and retail can pull off.
Historically speaking, December 25th didn’t even start as a Christian idea. The Romans got there first in 274 AD with a festival called Sol Invictus — the celebration of the “unconquered sun.” Feasting, gifts, candles, and winter partying. Not for Jesus. For the sun.
So when people say Christmas has pagan roots, they’re not wrong; the early church simply baptized an existing holiday and pointed it toward Bethlehem.
But Bethlehem was quiet. Jesus arrived in poverty, in a stable, born to a teenage peasant girl and a carpenter with enough trust in his young wife to step into a future he didn’t fully understand. His first visitors were shepherds, working-class stiffs who smelled like sheep and long shifts. The whole event unfolded small, humble, and unnoticed.
Compare that to Christmas now, with its stampedes into big-box stores, shipping deadlines, corporate sales targets, and enough blinking lights to guide planes into O’Hare. If Jesus was trying to slip quietly into the world today, He’d never get past the crowds at Costco.
The absurdity of it all hit me the other day while I was sitting on a mall bench, my preferred vantage point for people-watching, while my wife bravely battled her way through a store filled with at least 150 determined shoppers. Overhead, Bob Seger’s “Little Drummer Boy” was playing, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t the version the angels sang in Luke’s Gospel.
Then I swear I saw Jesus walk by.
He strolled past Bath & Body Works, took a peek inside, and went in which struck me as a theological oxymoron. Jesus, browsing three-wick candles with names like “Warm Leathered Amber”? What did I know? I’m from Chebanse.
I followed Him to the entrance of Kay Jewelers where He hovered, looking at the display case. He shook His head a couple of times, which made me hope He wouldn’t wander into Spencer’s. That would definitely trigger the Second Coming.
At one point I started wondering whether my mall sighting was a sign of Armageddon. Isn’t Jesus supposed to return before the whole world wraps up? And doesn’t He bring His Father with Him? I made a mental note to Google it later, fully aware that I’d forget by the time I got home and remember again only while staring into the fridge at midnight.
But sitting there, guarding my assigned mall bench like it was a civic duty, I started thinking about how upside-down our modern Christmas is. The first Christmas belonged to the poor, Mary and Joseph scraping by, shepherds sleeping in fields, a baby born in a manger because there was no room anywhere else.
Christmas started in a stable, not Aisle 6 at Macy’s.
Would Jesus approve of what Christmas has become? I don’t know. He might question the price tags, the frenzy, the stress, the part where people shove each other for one flat-screen TV for only $39.99. But He might also smile at the parts we get right: the generosity, the charitable giving, the families gathering, the kindness that surfaces, even if briefly, in grocery store lines and Salvation Army kettles.
Maybe the date doesn’t matter. Maybe the traditions don’t matter. Maybe Christmas is simply the yearly reminder that God tends to show up where we least expect Him, in a manger, in a moment of quiet, or even in a busy mall on December 22nd.
What would Jesus say? Probably something simple:
“Remember the story. And be kind to each other.”
Alan N. Webber
Author of Whipping Post & Roll Me Away
Cave Creek AZ & Bourbonnais IL
C - 815-545-6001
