EDITORIAL — Losing Christmas to commercialism

Tomorrow, majority in the Christian world the world over will once again celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, undisputedly God's greatest gift to mankind. Since time immemorial, Christians from all walks of life have marked Christmas with a bang, considering the fact that Christ was brought into the world for the sole purpose of saving man from evil.

It used to be a tradition that Christmas is celebrated on account of how Christ came into the world without the biggest orchestra being staged by man but with the loudest sounds of trumpets from heavenly angels. Throughout centuries, however, commercialism has been eating into the way Christians celebrate the birth of Christ.

Today in this modern world, celebrating Christmas would be useless without a new pair of shoes, or a new car for those whose wealth is even more than enough to satisfy their materialistic desire. In other words, celebrating Christmas today is always associated with huge spending.

Now Christmas has lost its true meaning. With every celebration becoming more commercialized, we begin to lose Christmas' true importance that sustains our Christian way of living. Too much commercialism had rendered us unable to comprehend why Christmas came to exist, why God gave us his only begotten Son only to be sacrificed later for man's wickedness.

We don't need to overhaul the way we celebrate Christmas. All we need is to heartily take the true meaning of why Christ had to come into the world in a very simple way, away from the extravagant celebration that Christians of today have known to mark

Christ's simple birth in a Bethlehem manger did not show us the way to celebrate it in the grandest party. He just wants us to celebrate it in a way that reminds us that God gave his only Son to the world to save mankind from sin.