We are now into one of the more interesting and probably most hectic time of the year for most people.

The holidays – gotta love ‘em!

The holidays feature so many different issues that bring out the best and worst in people. Here’s my own personal version of things brought to us by Thanksgiving, Christmas & New Years – can you add to the list?

[Note: I'm a Christian so I haven't mentioned the other religious holidays - and offer absolutely no apologies for being so non-PC.]

Louie’s 12 Issues of the Holidays!

Family – both good and bad side of this huge issue!
Travel & traffic.
Over eating.
Drinking.
Materialism.
Debt & overspending.
Loneliness due to excessive focus on family, friends, couples, etc.
Fatigue due to being even more busy than usual, with parties, etc.
Loss of focus due to many or all of the above.
Depression due to ridiculously high expectations of what holiday season should do for you.
Increase in the already very high level of the culture wars due to the War on Christmas.
Ersatz Spirituality on parade due to the religious nature that Christmas still maintains to many, and because of the forced optimisim that New Years brings to many.

Whew! I may just add list making to my list!

So that’s just a short list of some of the ways we’ve managed to mess up the holiday season. But I think it points out to even the most dense person imaginable that somewhere, somehow, we’ve gone sadly wrong with all this.

Surely this isn’t what they had in mind when these days were invented was it?

Nah!

So let’s start with that much abused word – holiday! I know a lot of Christians who won’t use it because they’ll say something like, “It’s not the holidays, it’s CHRISTMAS!“

Sound oh so pious doesn’t it? Too bad it’s WRONG!

Here’s how Dictionary.com defines the root meaning of holiday:

Middle English holidai, holy day, from Old English hlig dæg : hlig, holy; see holy + dæg, day; see day.]

You probably knew that – too bad both sides in the War Over Christmas don’t! Calling it the holidays doesn’t make it any less spiritual given what the word means. Of course it’s modern usage is following the general cultural trend towards either taking all things Christian out of the public square or redefining it to remove all specifically Christian content.

Our reactions to all this is instructive. For a long time I thought the best way to handle this was for true believers to just withdraw from pretty much all of it. Christmas has been so commercialized that it’s hopeless, so let’s just leave the world to it’s consummeristic nightmare and start all over again in the church.

I decided a few years ago that’s not a good idea. First of all it’s just not practical. Christmas it huge and it’s here and as Christians we have to deal with it.

Withdrawal isn’t the answer, and neither is just giving in and going along with the whole thing. Surrender to the world should not be part of the Christian Creed!

What does that leave? The hardest part of all – trying to walk the middle road, taking part in the celebrations we see around us, but attempting to keep an authentically Christian content in all that we say and do during these holy days.

That’s extremely challenging because it requires us to carefully and honestly examine ourselves, our motives and our actions. It calls upon us to build our own Christ-centered celebrations in the midst of, and often as a part of, the largely aChristian celebrations around us.

Hmmmm – would wishing us all good luck be appropriate about now?