It's impossible to celebrate Christmas without first expressing your opinion about Christmas.

If you're Bill O'Reilly [1], it's a chance to scream Merry Goldang Christmas! Do you hear me? That's the word Christmas, with "Christ" right there in the middle of it! That's what you're supposed to say!
If you're an atheist, it's a chance to scream Get your superstitious symbols out of my face! (Do atheists exchange gifts at Christmas, or do they wait until Darwin's Birthday? I have no idea.)
If you're a super-religious type, it's a chance to Praise Him Who Is Born This Day! If we would just Praise Him Who Is Born This Day in Bethlehem, we wouldn't be so focused on shopping!
If you're a sitcom writer, it's a chance to do Something Special for the Christmas Show. Maybe the old drunk in the alley should be just the person that Changes Raymond's [2] Life that night.

If you're a local TV news anchor, it's a chance to talk about Those Less Fortunate and The Holiday Spirit. There are always a bunch of Gag Me holiday stories on tv. The best one this year [3] is about some drive-through Starbucks where a patron arrived at the window and said, "I want to pay for my coffee and also the coffee of the person in the car behind me"–even though he didn't know the person in the next car. And then the next person did the same thing for the car behind him, and so on and so on, and the chain was unbroken for 200 cars, and all the Starbucks employees were misty-eyed about the people who ordered $34 worth of coffee and found out it was paid for, even though the person in front of them only got a Latte Grande with Sprinkles. And this was all presented as a story about The Christmas Spirit.

If you're an evangelical moralist, you listen to that story about the Starbucks and you say Yeah, right, they minister to people they never have to talk to! And they do it with their money! And they call that discipleship! That's not Christmas!
If you're Oprah, Christmas is a time to say Kwanza, Baby! And Vote for Barack!

If you're a theologian, it's a chance to say There's no way he was born at the winter solstice, that is so pagan.
If you're a pop-culture religion writer, Christmas is when you say No way she was a virgin, and we're not so sure about Bethlehem either.
If you're a Catholic cleric of any kind, it's when you say 17 jillion Hail Marys and talk about how Luke knew what he was talking about, and by the way, that was Luke, not somebody using Luke's name.

But most people who wanna fight about The Meaning of Christmas are Christians. And mostly they think we're going in the wrong direction, that the true meaning is fading away, that even the name of Christmas is fading away, that it's becoming a commercial holiday, a secular holiday, a corrupted tradition, that nobody cares about the church part of it, that all they care about is the gift-giving and the sentimental stories and the days off work, and the churches themselves are the worst, they don't even have that many services because it conflicts with the football games, and another thing, and another thing, and another thing . . .
And then there are those of us who believe that, every time Christmas becomes less Christian, there's a victory for Christ.

Christmas–even on the wrong day, even with the wrong stories surrounding it, even with a lot of pagan ritual attached to it–celebrates the entering into the world of the person who changed the world forever. From that time forward religion turned inward. Everything we could know about God was revealed in its entirety within us, not within a temple or on a mountaintop. It took us a long time to understand this. St. Augustine [4] tried to explain it, and he got most of it right, and then others carried it deeper, and then we got to the 21st century and most of the ways that Jesus turned the world upside down had become . . . commonplace, not attributed to Jesus at all. Perhaps that is how he builds the kingdom, by effacing himself as the builder.

There's an Italian philosopher named Benedetto Croce [5] who said "We cannot but call ourselves Christians." He was not a particularly Christian philosopher. He was saying this about all people. He was noting that, as the world grows more and more secular, the things in Christianity once considered lunacy by the world become accepted by all men. If you're not in the church you only see pale glimpses of it, but you see it and you know it.

Before Christ you would not have had a public holiday where you were expected to pay attention to the poor, give things away, eat common meals, rest from all your cares, be as close to others as possible, put aside differences, laugh, cry, drink, toast, seek an excess of joy. (Going to the movies on Christmas Day, watching the game–these are not perversions but fulfillments of what is meant by a holy day, a day set aside, the ultimate day of rest because a new life is come into the world.) Holidays before Christ were solemn, if not fearful events where gods were appeased. Anyone who attempts to save his life, at Christmastime, will, like Scrooge, be in danger of losing it. Forgiveness frequently occurs at Christmastime. Miracles happen at Christmastime, because a tiny micro-portion of divine love is understood, for a day, by all, even if they don't know what to do with it.

The Starbucks story is silly, except when you realize that thousands of people will tell and re-tell it, and the subtext will be, "I wish people were like this instead of like that." That's the whisper of Christ, a promise and a beckoning that says "better." When the world grows still on December 25th, that's a faint foretaste of peace. When we engage in the silly rituals, we all know they're silly, we make fun of ourselves even as we engage in them, and yet we continue to re-enact the story, not because it's Christian, but because it's beyond Christian, it's the promise to all men, forever, and they feel it in spite of themselves.
Happy Holidays, Bill.