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Santa Claus, reindeers, Christmas Trees, Christmas carols, Christmas gifts..
Do you sometimes have that feeling that Christmas is just another toll gate in every year's monopoly board? Pass go, collect your 13th month pay and spend it all on Christmas celebrations and gifts.
The children are expecting Santa Claus, writing Christmas letters and tenderly placing them on the tree, doesnt even remember to leave cookies and milk for the poor fool who will foot the bill and do the secret shopping.
As to the new parents, well they are just begginning to realize that life has come full circle and made them the butt of an age old joke. Tag, you're Santa! Sweat buckets and take out those cards, the days of generic Christmas toys have come and gone. Today's kids are even very specific about the gifts they want: Playstation 3, Ipod touch, etc. If in doubt, look for the Amazon or Ebay url link. Oh yes, those damn marketers have found new ways to torment you.
It doesnt even matter if the kid's good or bad anymore, doesnt count if teddy almost burned the house down last summer or flunked half of his subjects. Doesnt matter if annie almost scratched her playmate's eyes out because she touched her toys, or if little eddie used your vase collection as airgun target practice, it's Christmas afterall.
Office Christmas Parties are usually no better - being just another staging ground for office politics, ilicit affairs, backbiting and political moves. Reunions? Just another venue to compare and contrast lives, jobs, salaries and cars.
Toys, Christmas decors, food, xmas cards, exchange gifts, forwarded messages.. For all the hustle and bustle of today's Christmases, don't you sometimes feel it has become all fluff and no substance? That the meaning has somehow gotten lost in the heaps of Christmas gift wrappings, mass produced greeting cards, shopping lists and recipes?
Consider the following:
A poor carpenter secretly makes wooden toy cars for his kids from the wood leftovers of his recent job.
Father and son spend the afternoon together chopping wood and making Christmas Parols/Lanterns for their Shanty.
Son brings candles and flowers and spends the whole afternoon sitting on the grass near his parent's grave.
A young couple spends the day giving out warm blankets and pillows to homeless people on the cold streets.
Husband and wife spends the whole night on the porch, sipping warm choco while reminiscing on good memories.
For these people Christmas is an affirmation of life not of wealth, of building and repairing relationships instead of just trading gifts, of sharing - not tangible/material things but values and goodness.
All the Christmas trappings, gifts, parties, and doodads cannot hope to put meaning into an otherwise meaningless Christmas.
So.. For all your holiday expenses this year,
are you skipping Christmas?
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