The other day, my wife and I were doing some decorating for Christmas.  It’s our first Christmas in the new to us house in which we live, so we were pretty excited to get things decorated.  She had been looking for a small nativity scene that had been misplaced, and when she finally discovered its whereabouts, she said, “The baby is missing!”  Sure enough, all the little figures were there except for baby Jesus.  A nativity scene without the baby just kind of loses something.

It seems like Jesus gets less prominent in the celebration of Christmas with every passing year; so much so, many have stopped calling it Christmas.

Few people realize what a new phenomenon this commercialized, Santa Claus Christmas is.  There was a Saint Nicholas in the fourth century, who was a preacher of the gospel and was known for his benevolence.  I wonder what he would have to say, if he could see what we have done to Christmas?  The Germans helped us get the Santa Claus idea, but it really didn’t gain a lot of ground until 1822, when the poem, “The Night Before Christmas,” was published.

There is a classic movie that has been remade into a modern version, entitled, “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.”  What the Grinch failed to do in that story, we have pretty much succeeded at doing by removing Christ from the celebration.

Maybe we ought to call it something else, because what most of the world is celebrating is not the birth of Christ.  Nevertheless, “Merry Christmas!”