Every year it seems to start earlier and earlier. We didn’t even make it past Halloween this year before it started. But I guess you can’t blame people for being antsy to get the emotions flowing. After all, we only get one month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and that is not nearly enough time to wage a war.

Oh wait – you thought I was complaining about how Christmas decorations come out earlier every year? Sorry, I was referring to the pretty much guaranteed squawking about secular culture waging a war on Christmas. We have already been told how Starbucks is ruining Christmas for millions of Christians by removing snow flakes from coffee cups.

(even though, of course, as a Christian you should boycott Starbucks over their stance on gay marriage…. right?)

It just dawned on me that these heralds of the destruction of all things Sweet Baby Jesus are actually correct. There really is a war on Christmas going on every year. There is a group of people out there hell-bent on ripping the living, breathing meaning of Christmas right out of the chest of every cheap plastic nativity scene on every Church lawn out there. Problem is, its not the atheists, post-modernists, secularists, greedy corporate executives, sodomites, or evil liberal college professors (the ones requiring you to deny that St. Nick was actually a jolly servant of Jesus or else fail his course).

The people waging a war on Christmas are evangelical Christians.

The real meaning of Christmas is Emmanuel – God with us. Its a beautiful story of the Supreme Being of the whole universe humbling Himself to be born in a manager. To become a baby born in squalid circumstances. To grow up to heal the sick, to befriend the least of these, to be mocked and ridiculed by the culture around Him, to bring a message of hope and salvation, to preach repentance to the self-righteous, to dine with social outcasts, to buy products from unrighteous merchants, to forgive sins.

Does any of this sound anything like what we are getting from so many Christians or churches in the media?

Instead, we get complaints over coffee cup decorations. Complaints that Santa was moved to the wrong place in the mall. Complaints that people can’t turn their house into a tacky and annoying eye-burning Christmas spectacle. Complaints about not being able to have live nativities on public government property.  And those are just from October and the first few days of November.

None of these complaints have anything to do with anything we are called to do as Christians.

So, yes, those that are complaining about the War on Christmas are actually unintentional double agents, actively creating the war and not realizing it. How is that? Because they are complaining about things that have nothing to do with Emmanuel, God is with us. The are completely obscuring the meaning of God Incarnate a thousand times more than anyone that says “Happy Holidays” in place of “Merry Christmas,” or that removes a cheap wooden nativity scene off of public property. They are making a mockery of the real meaning of being present in messy world, or breaking down the barrier between the divine and the ordinary, or being a realistic Savior in a complex world. The real war on Christmas is not about removing man-made traditions from the public arena, but about removing God-breathed love from the discourse that occurs within that arena.