Gift or Burden
J. D. Pendry
I wish a Merry Christmas to you and yours. I pray that our Men and Women serving around the world and their families receive the Christmas gift of peace.
I’m sorry, but I do not offer season’s greetings or wishes for happy holidays or some other generic greeting in hopes of not offending you because you choose not to acknowledge the true reason for the season. There will soon be a Nativity Scene in my front yard. Except for scattering some lights about and putting fake greenery on the porch rail, that is the extent of my exterior Christmas decorations. Christmas is for the celebration of the birth of the Christ Child, a gift to humankind. If you do not accept that, then my prayer is that someday you will.
Do you know why the day following Thanksgiving Day is called black Friday? It’s the first day that retailers across our country and much of the globe begin to show a profit for the year. Ponder that for a minute. Many millions of dollars in merchandise is sold during a span of a few weeks. It is merchandise that many people were employed to make. It is a season for intense manufacturing, marketing, buying and selling that no politician, business man or economist could have ever conceived and made work. Hundred dollar barrels of oil cannot take down our economy, but without Christmas I think it tanks. That’s just an observation from an old country boy from up the holler about the material gift given to our society for acknowledging the birth of Christ. You will likely get a much different view from an ACLU lawyer. Or, maybe you have a different view as well. I assure you, some who do have already scrolled down to the unsubscribe link. I wish them a Merry Christmas too.
Many people celebrate Christmas without ever acknowledging the birth of Christ. My view is that people who choose to celebrate the season without accepting the reason for it are not different from the people who want to come to America and accept the gifts of the land of opportunity without accepting the reasons that the opportunities exist.
I find it quite interesting when I think about it. The people who have made it their careers to banish Christ from Christmas and to remove all vestiges of Christianity from American society are basically the same people who want to stand by while our country is stolen from us and enable the thieves in their attempt to take it.
This time of year, we spend much of our time worrying about giving the right gift or receiving something nice in return. What we do not give enough thought to is preserving the gifts we already have. These are gifts that define us as a people and a nation. Gifts that we all too often take for granted. These are the God given gifts of freedom, the ability to express ourselves and the free will choose our own way.
The Christmas celebration is very much a part of what America is… one nation under God. We spend too much time in America apologizing for who we are and defending what we believe while wishing for acceptance from those who would as soon see us dead and our country destroyed. We owe no apologies or compromise to the failed societies whose people came here to escape real poverty and oppression. We do not owe any apologies to the people who come to America to live for insisting that they arrive legally and learn our language, history and laws. We owe them no apologies for insisting that they recognize that there is such a thing as a pure American culture. It is a culture consisting of a world class blend of people with the common focus of preserving freedom, individual liberties, freedom of religious worship and the freedom to express ourselves.
What each of us must ask of ourselves, of those who want to live here and of those who lead us is are we gifts or burdens. Are we gifts to that uniquely American culture or are we burdens that are destined to break it. Are we gifts to our society or burdens on it? Are we gifts to the people who depend on us or burdens on them? Do we look to contribute or just to take away?
Our gifts in this country are many, and I do not believe that is by accident. You may, but if you do please contemplate why it is that we are the most powerful and wealthiest nation on the planet. Is it because we are smarter than other people of the world or by some Darwinian accident we evolved faster than the rest of the world, or, is it because at our beginning we placed our faith in an entity that we can’t even see as expressed in our national motto, “In God We Trust?”
Copyright© J. D. Pendry 2007 All Rights Reserved