What is Christmas about anyway?

This morning on the way to work, I was listening to 2 DJs plugging a hip new mobile phone - "what you really need this Christmas..." and "I have therefore I am!". In the midst of the breaking NKF scandal, it is all the more stark that having is a deep-seated need. "I have therefore I am!" is a subtle word play on ownership, and even the phrase "I am" seems to hark back to the original name of God Yahweh, meaning "I am". The subliminal message being sent out is that these physical pleasures are the key to the ultimate existence of self sufficiency and supremacy. And it is all the more evident that there are people out there who are willing to bend the rules to gain power, material wealth and an edge over others. Gold taps, 1st class airline travel, unlimited corporate spending, fat pay packets...there is something that baulks at these blatant excesses, but truth to tell, we are all guilty of it in some way or another.

If we want to look beyond the glitter of wealth and having this Christmas, we have to journey to a gritty turn of the millenium setting. Freezing desert cold, a young, inexperienced woman heavy with child and cloaked by the scandal of unwed motherhood. A dark and dank stable, redolent of the waste of animals, and an unseen (but not unanticipated) birth in the grimiest and starkest of settings. No gentle glow surrounding this couple and baby as depicted on Christmas cards. Just the lonely birthing process, the beginning of a life planned from the beginning of time as a sacrifice. So what does Christmas mean today?

Salvation is free but is not cheap. "We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time" Romans 8:22. Heaven and earth was poised for the birth and death of Jesus, and the salvation we receive by believing in Him is real and life-transforming. Just last week, my mother visited her natural father in Kuching, and he, by all accounts, should have been dead 2 months ago from perforated sigmoid colon due to cancer. But he was miraculously kept alive and lucid, to the time my mother was able to share Jesus with the old man. His behaviour changed overnight, to the astonishment of his daughters - there was a clear transformation from his salvation experience. A few days later, he passed away, demonstrating conclusively God's amazing timing and mercy.

So what is Christmas about anyway? I have been obsessively preparing for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day dinners to the point that last night I actually dreamed that my kampong chicken lady said that she had stayed up to 12 midnight to chop liver for me! I have been up to my eyeballs with buying and wrapping Christmas gifts and decorating the house. Friends in New York are fuming with the transit strike because they can't get their pre-Christmas chores done. But Christmas is not just about giving and receiving, celebrating or enjoying. In the middle of the busyness of the season, take a moment to stop and think of that astonishing occasion more than 2000 years ago, when immortality, omnipotency and eternity came into this earth as frail, tangible, touchable humanity.