The Concrete Cowboy

Not C, of course.

C is for Christmas. No, not that Christmas, the other Christmas – the mid-winter educational hiatus festival of lights sickingly sappy sentimentality only a new car will make you happy ecumenical reindeer-trampled grandmas watching ‘round-the-clock red n’green sweater’d romcoms (in July) Christmas.

There is no doubt that we need a little and we need it now, but in the absence of meaning there is a meaningful increase in merrymaking.

Don’t answer this:

But if your neighbors accused you of being a Jesus freak, would there be enough evidence in your seasonal display to convict?

Yeah… there is more holiday in Christmas than Christ in the holiday.

Fortunately for everybody, “Happy Holidays” is unhip and the C word is cool again (so long as the C word has little to do with the X word).

Long before the comically festive DEI Happy Holiday crowd, the crassly commercialized Xmas-ers also attempted to remove the Reason from the Season, but in truth only revealed the 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐭𝐡 from the original Greek.

χριστός-mas… the birth of Christos

Algebraically, X represents the unknown. Perhaps their abbreviation was merely a equation in search of a solution:

Xmas = [Christmas – $$$$]
Solve for X

In days of old, fortune hunters would follow a cartographer’s X to chart their quest to hidden treasure. The X of Christmas can be discovered on a walk through Bethlehem:

The night was silent and there was peace on Earth. Caesar insisted. No department store sales. No musical displays. No red kettle’d Santas. But there were shepherds…

And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. ^{Luke 2:16}

Some thirty-odd years later, the first Christmas tree would be hacked with an axe and stripped bare of its leafy foliage then hefted and left undecorated.

Just thorns and spikes.

Many had hoped that the Christ had come to free them from the tyranny of Rome, but Jesus was born to save us from the tyranny of sin. And died that we might live.