wahlau's online hut

Again we have Christmas near the corner. Great opportunity for shops to sell more, and people to buy more. Gifts, cards and smses would be flying around either on the Christmas eve or on the big day itself. we are kind of used to it, i think, no matter if you are a christian (serious or non-serious ones) or not. It is just so amazing: everyone can celebrate Christmas in regardless of your origin and religion. The reason behind? it is less "christian" than it should be.

my wife asked me about it a few weeks ago,

"did you realise that only christians allow their religious celebration to be fully commercialized?" 

"erm no, really? let me think..."

"let's say, look at Hari Raya. Do you think anyone would be crazy enough to put another icon like Santa Claus and relate him with Raya?"

"no way, no muslim would allow that."

"how about Wesak?"

"well, i think Buddhists are tolerant, but to the extend of replacing their religious events with something else, naw..."

"but how come Christmas and Easter are so different from how they should be? You see Christmas nowadays more towards gifts celebration and Santa Claus, while Easter is full with eggs and bunnies."

"hmm, because we are more tolerant than expected?"

(above conversation is edited for better readability )

i think from the conversation it set both of us (hopefully you too) thinking. Come to think about it, isn't Christmas a day to remember Christ Jesus's birth (our pal Jesus wasn't born in December anyway)? Santa wasn't even near the manger (and many do not understand what a manger is) when Christ was born, and yet he can replace Christ when Christmas is celebrated (Pretty cute/contradicting idea actually. Imagine it is your birthday, and yet people all hold a party for someone else ). And when others (in the states perhaps) insisted, perhaps one day Christmas would be totally changed into a neutral event (at least they still think christmas has something to do with Christ and God)

On the other hand, christians are trying hard to protect the true meaning of Christmas. But to a certain extend, many christians don't even know why and what. They only receive "bulat-bulat"[1] everything the pastor said, and recycle the received information. This is perhaps the real problem behind the lagging of the true meaning of Christmas: we are not serious about knowing something really well. We often just receive, swallow then vomit out without processing information we've got. The result would not be convincing, both for our audiences and even ourselves. Sadly this is the common problem everywhere.

Irene mentioned something pretty right about different characters in the original christmas story. We often judge many things with our own level of judgement. As long as the item is not up to our expectation, we usually say it is not good. Value of something is no longer based on its real value, but how we prefer to evaluate. This is totally against the attitude for the real thing - instead of we learning and accepting things as they are, we tend to judge it and allow ourselves to be the defacto judge. How sad but true.

are we today letting go the true value and meaning of our believes and celebrations, or we are willing to take up the responsibility to know them well and to protect/promote them the right way so that we do not end up poor in culture and self-value. It is your choice.

at the same time while you might be cracking your head (to understand what the heck did wahlau actually wrote or to ponder on the points i wrote), i would like to take this chance to wish all of you a blessed christmas and a bright hopeful new year.