Guess what kids...

…Santa Clause is not real (and neither is the tooth fairy).  You can thank me later for letting your kids know the truth.  Now you are free to explain to them the real reason for Christmas. You’re probably not surprised that I didn’t lie to my kids about Santa Claus.  Actually, my parents never tried to pass off Santa as real either, so I guess you could say it runs in the family. 

Now before you turn me or my parents in for child abuse let me explain the problem with Santa Claus, and in a broader sense the commercialized, waterdown, poltically correct version of what we call Christmas.  Before I begin let me explain to you that I’m not history major.  I’m not going to lecture you on the historical basis for Christmas or argue that Jesus was born in some other month and Christmas is really a pagan holiday, but I am going to argue that the current version of the December 25th holiday robs us of celebrating what was the greatest gift given to mankind. 

The first problem I have with our current version of Christmas is Santa Claus.  I won’t go as far as a church in Georgia telling people that Santa Claus is Satan, but he’s pretty close.  Have you ever thought much about the logic of Santa Clause?  I’m not just talking about some person squeezing his fat body down chimneys, riding in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer and delivering gifts to all the boys and girls in the world in one night. 

I’m talking about that flipping list he keeps.  How nerve-wracking to kids, constantly worrying if they were naughty or nice. What’s more is that Santa never gives the criteria for naughty or nice.  In all the Hallmark Christmas movies about Santa Claus he never tells us flat out what it takes to get on the nice list.  Is the standard set in stone?  Does it change?  What happens if I spill the milk on Christmas Eve, lie about to my parents and blame it on my brother?  What then?! Am I out, the day he’s supposed to show up?!  I couldn’t live with this kind of pressure.

“Oh come on L. Kyle, don’t be such a party pooper, of course kids don’t worry about that.”

Don’t they?  If a kid believes that some fat and jolly guy delivers gifts to them wouldn’t they worry about what gets them on the ‘nice list’?  What about kids who constantly hear from their parents that they are failures?  What hope do they have? Kids believe in Santa because they have faith; faith that mom and dad are telling them truth, faith in things unseen.  And it’s because of that faith that I want them to know the truth about Christmas. 

The second problem I have with December 25th is how water-downed it has become. Christmas should be a time to celebrate that God came down from heaven, down to humanity.  The God of the Bible isn’t a god who sits afar off, inaccessable, but He is a God who loves us so much that he came to us.  He came to us to provide relationship with Himself.  The fact that the Creator of the Universe came down to us is cause to celebrate.  It is a time to gather with our families and celebrate God’s goodness.

But the falacy with our culture is that the meaning behind the Hol(y)day is being stripped away.  God established feasts and festivals for the Nation of Isreal to hold every year so they would not forget what He did for them.  Likewise we should celebrate Christmas not just to buy stuff or have family dinners, but we should celebrate so that we never forget that God Himself came down to us, not to condemn us, but to bring us life. 

The meaning of Christmas is being stripped away not because political correctness, but people want to strip all refernces to God away from us. 

“No L. Kyle, I just don’t want to offend someone who may celebrate Kwanzaa or another holiday, that’s why I say ‘Happy Holidays’”

Nope. If that was the case then December 25 would not be a holiday in this country.  You see, everyone still wants to get the day off, everyone wants to get gifts.  Retailers plan for Christmas, they depend on Christmas to survive.  Our society still wants a day off and to give and get gifts, but it just wants to do it without mentioning God. 

“What about Easter L. Kyle, not a huge fuss over that.”

Of course not because Easter falls on a Sunday during the Spring.  Most of us already get Sunday’s off and retail isn’t dependent on the success of the Easter shopping season.  It’s almost laughable when Target advertises huge discounts for “holiday shopping”.  Or when retailers tell us that there only so-many days of the “holiday shopping season” left.  Do they think we are that stupid?  No they just want to strip God from our culture. 

According to the Education World website (go figure) December is a month of Multicultural Holiday Celbrations.  Here is their list:

Ramadan

Eid al-Fitr

Saint Nicholas day

Eid’ul-Adha

Fiesta of Our Lady of Guadalupe

St. Lucia Day

Hanukkah

Christmas Day

Three Kings Day/Epiphany

Boxing Day

Kwanzaa

Omisoka

Yule

Satumalia

Other than Boxing Day, which is celebrated in the UK, none of these holidays have gift giving as one of their major components except for Christmas.  Yet the “holiday shopping” season is supposed to multi-cultural.  But what are people shopping for?  Christmas gifts or “holiday gifts.”  And why does the mult-cultural shopping season end on December 24th?

It seems to me that people want all the pleasantries of Chirstmas without the meaning of Christmas.  “Give me gifts and a day off,” some would say, but don’t tell me about the real meaning behind it. 

The sad thing about this whole deal is that God gave us His Son as a gift and our society wants us to forget that.

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." John 3:16

Leftovers enjoy.

L. Kyle.

Down the rabbit hole we go...

…and much like the world that Alice encounter, the world we live is starting to make very little sense.  Take this story which broke in February about a California High School senior who is named Pat (fitting name) who claims he is a girl trapped in a boy’s body.  In a normal world Pat’s claim would not be that big of deal, but in California his claim lands him a spot on his High School’s girls’ softball team. 

Under California’s newly enacted law Assembly Bill 1266 students will have access to facilities, sports teams and programs that are consistent with their gender identity, not necessarily their biological composition. 

So that’s it then; all a person has to do to have access to opposite gender facilities and teams is claim they are a girl or a boy.  Do you believe now that we are in a different world?  Are we not, in fact in a Bizzaro world here?  And the absolutely maddening part is that people in the media don’t even bat an eye.  In fact in few news stories I have read refer to Pat as ‘she’!!!

Take a more recent story of a family who was given an award because their daughter wanted to be a boy and the parents not only complied with their daughter’s instance, but e-mailed their friends to tell them the good news.  Insanity!  First, that the parents would cave into their child’s demand and second because there is an award for such things (of course the award is in honor of Harvey Milk so what do you expect?).

 

The parents claim that a large percentage of children with ‘gender identity’ issues end up committing suicide.  Which if you ask L. Kyle, it sounds like LGBT community bullied the parents into this.  The LGBT community wants us all to think that ‘transgender’ is a real thing rather than just an excuse for people to behave in whatever manner makes them feel good.

The champions of the gender identity issues have not stopped to think about the ramifications of these decisions.  All they see is perceived equality for sexually deviant behavior.  When I was growing up the big push was not to have sex before you were married, but it was always implied that boys would be married to girls.  Now days it’s not a question of having sex before you are married (that’s a given), but what gender you want to have sex with and even more, what gender do you want to be! 

The maddening part of all this is that people in our nation are just nodding their heads and going along with this garbage.  What was the school board discussion about Pat’s request like?  Did anyone stand up and say “No amount of make-up or frilly clothes will change this boy’s DNA?”  And that’s really the point; a person can lop off parts of their bodies and take hormone pills, but it will not change the fact that women have two X chromosomes and men have one X and one Y.

But we’ve gone nutty with perceived gender identity issues. TIME magazine this month has transgender issues as their front page cover.  People are getting awards for dressing their girl up as a boy.  And the speed at which these issues are being brought to the forefront of society is astonishing.  It’s almost as if there is an agenda beneath all of these actions. 

Oh wait, there is an agenda.  And this agenda is being built on the backs of young people like Ryland and Pat who are confused about life.  And this agenda is more sinister than it appears.  Simply put, this agenda is pure evil.  This agenda will stop at nothing short of stripping every last piece of morality from American culture. 

Oh, L. Kyle, you’re such a right wing loon!

That may be, but look where we have come from.  It wasn’t too long ago that sex was regarded as something only for marriage between a man and a woman.  I’m not naïve, sex outside of marriage has been around in America forever, but at the very least it wasn’t celebrated and at best it was discouraged.  Now days even the staunchest conservatives and many Christians see pre-marital sex as okay.  In fact in a recent poll 61% of Christians say that they would have sex before marriage.

Okay, so change the views about sex outside marriage, check. 

Now that the agenda had won that battle it moved on to homosexuality.  That one has been a little tougher, but through clever use of language and with a little help from science, homosexuality has become more widely accepted.  After all, if science can say that a person’s sexual orientation is part of their DNA then we can equate sexual preference to race, gender and eye color.

Homosexuality widely accepted, check.

The agenda hasn’t stopped there; after all homosexuals can blend into society and the agenda can’t have that.  Ah!  Transgender, that’s the next thing to have accepted.  Now, not only should we accept homosexual activity as normal we need to also accept men dressing and acting as women and women dressing and acting like men.  And we can see that the agenda is gaining ground.  So much so that boys like Pat are being called ‘her and she’ all because they say so.  Watch the first 30 seconds of this clip and tell me that this is not the same thing.  Lunacy!

So what is the next stop for the agenda?  Think about what’s left people!  Once we deviate from the standard of sexual relationships, which is one man, one woman in the bounds of marriage, everything will become acceptable.  How much further will the Godly people allow this to go before we rise up and challenge this agenda?

Sex with animals?  Will that be enough?  What happens when the agenda comes for our kids?  And it will.  Ney, it already has.  The agenda is already teaching our children in elementary school about sex and sexuality.  When our teachers should be teaching reading, writing and arithmetic, they are teaching our kids about sexuality. 

This agenda is winning and it is gaining ground and quickly.  It has already consumed pop culture, it’s taking over our education institutions and worst of all it’s sweeping through our churches. 

Edmund Burke said that all that has to happen for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.  So, good men and women are we going to do nothing and watch our children and this nation be consumed by an evil agenda?  Or are we going to stand up and fight.  That doesn’t mean holding signs that say, “God hates fags”, but it means getting our knees and praying for God’s mighty hand to work in this great nation.  It means evangelizing the lost and disciplining those who are Christians already.  It means setting aside our watered-down Christianity, which is more concerned with our own prosperity, and truly living for Christ, which means accomplishing the Great Commission.

Go therefore and make disciples (Matt 28:19).

Left overs enjoy,

L. Kyle