
Some things beyond gifts we all should treasure on Christmas.
December 18, 2005
Christmas Eve Service: Looking at Religion, Freedom and Christ's Birth.
Christmas List 2006: Some Christmas wishes.
Do I Oppose Stem Cell Research?: Stem cell research can be good or bad depending on how it's used.
Freedom in the Book of Gensis: One perspective on the bible and notions of freedom.
Imagine: A short essay on imagination and how it can help improve our world.
Judgment Day: The day of reckoning may be far off, but we are always affecting our world.
On The Black God: Thoughs on morality, bible thumbing, and hate crimes.
Our Greatest Sin: Failure to change the world as Jesus would want is everybody's biggest sin.
Religion in Schools: Why creationism and school prayer should play a role in education.
Tao of Cowboy: Things we can learn from taoism in our lives.
The greatest Christmas gift is something that lasts forever. It's not something whose wrapper you chuck in that 55 gallon drum and celebrate by breathing in that thick black toxic plastic smoke. That is far from happinesss. It has to be something far greater then material stuff.
To me it is Patridge Run. Every Christmas morning I go out to that place, going for a nice long walk in the snow, and ride around on snow covered roads with my 4x4 truck and my dog on my side. This is a place of true greatness, of natural happiness far more then what one consumer gift might be. It's about being natural.
The gift of christmas is also about being with your family and eating together. It might be a factory farm turkey, or it might be something more natural like vencine if your luckly enough at your hunt. The important thing is to be together, to reflect, to be truly part of our earth. The gift is about love.
It's also the candlelight service and church. It's about the hope that such a service instills upon us, as a baby more then 2000 years who was born to help us forever cope withour weaknesses. A baby not unlike you and I, a king no richer then the typical person on the street.
Christmas should forever last in our minds. It should not be about trash preserved forever in a landfill or toxic smoke produced by our consumerism. We all like stuff, but we should try to dig deeper then plastic bags, and go back out in the same nature that created all of us including Jesus Christ.
Copyright ©1999-2008 Andy Arthur.
All mistakes are intentional or otherwise.
Mind where you step in a cow pasture or legal mindfield.