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During the Advent Season

December

During the Advent Season, Christians light a candle each Sunday until all four
candles are lighted. On Christmas Eve and Day we light the middle white candle, the
Christ candle. We are celebrating again, the coming of Christ; we have one more candle
of light and then ‘voila’, Christmas 2005!
Let’s examine Christmas 2005, while the scent of the burning Advent candles of
Christ our Hope, Christ the way, Christ our Joy, and Prince of Peace are still in our recent
olfactory memories. I’m not really sure what ‘freedom of religion’ is all about when we
can celebrate Christmas but some retailers want to delete the word Christmas when
advertising Christmas trees. As Oscar Wilde said, “The true mystery of the world is the
visible, not the invisible.” What is going on in this visible world? Should we delete the
word Chanukah from Chanukah candles and call them holiday candles? Whom would
this suit anyway, the antagonist – another Hitler type?
I received an email from a friend requesting my signature on a petition for American
Federated Families which read like this:
The companies which refused to mention Christmas a single time in 260 pages of
insert promotions were Target, Walgreens, Sears, Staples, Lowe's, J.C. Penney, Dell and
Best Buy.”
Ask these companies why they banned "Christmas" in their in-store promotions and
retail advertising and they will tell you they didn't want to offend anyone. They mean, of
course, anyone except Christians.
Come now! Christ/Christmas is “the Reason for the season”. God love Jackie
Mason, the Jewish Comedian, (who spent three years as a rabbi). On the Bill O’Reilly
Show he said that Christmas doesn’t offend Jewish people and Chanukah doesn’t offend
Christians. The Fox show won big points because the word Christ/Christmas is back in
many stores.
I’m not an activist, but I’m thinking that Christians have to speak out now! - Enough
is enough! These offensive actions regarding Christians are becoming scary to me! We
read about injustices all the time, but I believe we have to wake up to these injustices: . . .
of stores taking Christ out of Christmas, and the talk of taking ‘In God We Thrust’ off the
U.S. currency, and taking crosses off government property. One email I received showed
hundreds of crosses at the Arlington Cemetery on the graves of persons who died for our
freedom saying, “Should we remove these crosses too?”
Let’s continue to examine Christmas 2006 as we light our Advent candles . . . let’s be
ever so vigilant, so that we can light those candles and have a Christmas tree – Christmas
2007! God forbid, is there another Hitler lurking in the wings? Like the Santa song goes,
“Oh, you better watch out!”

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