My thoughts on Christmas have run the gamut over my life.

As a child, I thought about Christmas as a combined sacred and secular time. I accepted them side by side, and never thought about their relationship. I knew that it was about the birth of Jesus. In fact, one of the first books that I remember is a little book that tells the Christmas story, illustrated by pictures showing the characters in the story portrayed by children, as they would be in a Christmas pageant. One of the first passages of Scripture that I memorized was the story of the birth of Jesus and the angelic appearance to the shepherds from Luke 2. It was a time when we sang special songs at church and had Christmas programs.

Yet I knew that there was also a secular side of Christmas. It was a time when everyone put up decorated trees and put lights on the trees and on their houses. They hung stockings on their mantles. Some had manger scenes on their lawns, and some had figures of Santa Claus and his reindeer on their lawns or even their roofs. Santa Claus was this magical, jolly little man or possibly elf, who supposedly lived at the North Pole. On Christmas, he flew all around the world in a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer, or nine if you listen to Gene Autry. In one night, he came down everyone's chimney and left presents for those who had been good, and lumps of coal for those who had been bad. In the off season, it seemed like he moonlighted making Coca-Cola ads.

Christmas was a special time because people decorated and did special things. I can remember going with my father on business to various offices in Bessemer, Alabama, and seeing Christmas decorations and displays. I guess I was impressed that people would take the time to set all this up, and figured that it must mean something special.

We never had a real Christmas tree that I can remember. We always had a small, tabletop artificial tree between two and three feet tall. It was made by Noma and had built-in sockets for Noma bubble lights, which came with the tree. The tree was wired in series, split into two parts. If one of the bulbs went out or a socket got loose, half the tree went dark. We kept the box, which had boxes for the bubble lights and special places to store them between the cardboard squares that held the tree in place in the box. This tree served us well into my early adulthood. As time went by, some of the bubble lights got broken or wore out. After a while, we could not find any more in quite the same style, and we had to replace them with differently shaped bubble lights. After a while, we could no longer find them at all and had to use regular Christmas lights in some of the sockets. Eventually, the tree wore out and got to where it would not light, and we threw it away. That was a sad day. Of all the things that I have lost over the years, that is one that, for some reason, I still wish that I had.

Fashion goes in cycles. In recent years, the bubble lights have made a comeback and are available again. We have two night lights that are bubble lights with an angel and a reindeer on them. I have never seen anything like our little tree.

As a child, I always associated Christmas with getting presents. I still have pictures that my father took of me one Christmas morning, coming wide-eyed into the living room and seeing the presents that I had received. It is a shame that I did not learn until later to associate it with giving as well as receiving.

Christmas is special to me because on Christmas Day, 1967, I accepted Jesus as my Savior. I thought I had accepted Jesus at age 9, but I was never quite easy about it during my teen years. Then at age 15, for some reason I was behaving particularly badly on Christmas day. I realized then that I was truly a sinner. I don't think the fact had ever come home to me before. That is when I trusted Christ.

As I got into graduate school, I got in touch with a group of Sovereign Grace Landmark Baptists in eastern Kentucky. They were of the opinion that Christians should not celebrate Christmas. Their primary reason was that it was not commanded in the Bible. Plus, it was mostly a mixture of pagan celebrations, such as Yule, Saturnalia, and Zagmut, that had worked their way into Christianity. And of course, it was too Catholic. Under their influence, there were some years in the mid to late 1970s that I would not celebrate Christmas at all. I swung back and forth in my views. Other years, I would celebrate it to some degree, but without any of the secular pagan trappings, such as Christmas trees and Santa Claus.

I am now going through a time of re-examination. I still have trouble with the pagan and commercial aspects. I have difficulty seeing what spending lots of money to buy presents out of a feeling of obligation has to do with the birth of Jesus. I have difficulty seeing what holly, mistletoe, fir trees, colored lights, ornaments, Santa Claus, elves, and flying reindeer have to do with it either.

More thoughts to come:

• The secularization of Christmas
• Dickens's A Christmas Carol
• Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales
• The current efforts to banish the religious aspects of Christmas
• Christmas music
• The Scriptural poetry of the Christmas story
• Christmas traditions
• Christmas for its own sake, having a life of its own
• Advent
• New view of Christmas and the incarnation: "This changes everything!"