It’s January 9 and our Christmas decorations are all still up inside. David did take down the decorations on the front of the house on Wednesday, but that’s it. We might have taken the indoor ones down by now, but I hurt my back Tuesday morning which has derailed my plans for my last week before we start homeschooling. I’m just now starting to feel like it’s getting steadily better each day. 

I’m also rather reluctant to take the Christmas decorations down. I love all the pretty lights throughout the house in both the morning and evening. We’ve had a fair amount of cloudy weather lately and the lights make it all seem cheerful. Keeping the decorations up a bit longer feels like a way to block the outside world and still live a bit in a world of enchantment. 

So I need to decide if I want to spend tomorrow (Saturday) putting it all away so it’s done before we start up full-strength on homeschool Monday or if we want to milk the sparkling joy for another week. 

In the midst of this, I’ve been reflecting on Christmas this week. 

I realized that I do not like watching Christmas movies at Christmas. I prefer to watch them in the peak of summer. When I’m in the midst of Christmas, I don’t need Christmas movies. I need them when it’s hot and humid outside. 

The same kind of applies to Christmas music. We’ve listened to more of it after Christmas than we did before.

I wish our American Thanksgiving was earlier in the fall. When the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is short, it feels like everything gets compressed too much. I wanted to get my decorations up earlier, but I also don’t like glossing over Thanksgiving in order to get to Christmas. It feels wrong to do so. 

I saw so many people discussing online this year that Christmas just isn’t the same any longer. There was a noticeable uptick in this sentiment. I spent some time thinking about why that is. 

One, our culture is sadly less homogeneous. In the past, it was accepted that Christmas was a part of the culture. It was everywhere and no one apologized for it. Only a few angry atheists would complain each year and we mostly ignored them. Now we have a segment of the population that cherishes neither Jesus Christ or cultural traditions. In addition, we’re too worried about offending people who don’t even love America or our traditions. That disparagement has a negative impact overall on our cultural celebration.

Two, Christmas in the marketplace has lost its transcendence. I remember when I worked in the mall that every two or three songs was a Christmas carol. If you hear Christmas songs in public now, they are completely secular, stupid, and generally poorly performed. I took Caroline for a haircut in December. The Christmas radio station was on and every single song they played was awful. In the past, we would hear the Gospel preached in public places through the music for weeks on end. That is all gone. 

Three, the public decorations and bustle have largely disappeared. Even if you didn’t love going to the mall, it was still an event we shared across the country. Lots of gorgeous decorations in the department stores and throughout the mall. It was festive. You knew you were in the midst of something different. It was pretty. The malls have cut way back. The department stores have hardly anything out. With online shopping, it’s just not the same. We’ve lost another in-person cultural connection.

Lastly, many of the women who made Christmas magical are either gone or have stopped as they have gotten older and it was no longer physically feasible. There was a generation or two of women who put in a lot of effort to make Christmas special. Christmas in the 80s and 90s was big and colorful. It was elaborate. Those of us who grew up with that think of that as normal.

Slowly things have changed. Now other generations of women make a point of saying they aren’t going to go all-out. They don’t think it’s worth it. Maybe they can’t afford it. But the extra time and effort that went into making those Christmases of the past something special aren’t there in younger generations. I don’t mean that as a criticism or a statement that one is right and one is wrong. It’s just a fact. We have a significant segment of the younger and middle aged female population that isn’t married and/or doesn’t have children. That lack of engagement is going to be noticed in the culture at large. 

I realize many of the changes I’ve mentioned above have nothing to do with the birth of Jesus Christ. We all know we have both sacred and cultural Christmas celebrations in our country. But diminishing the transcendent and sacred removes the opportunity for the lost to hear the Gospel and for believers to be immersed in the Truth in a different way for a month. Diminishing the cultural strips us of our shared connection to the joys of the past and denies the children of today of the same kind of memory making.

We are poorer for the loss of both. 

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