So Christmas Eve has come around again. We read in Isaiah 61: 1 that: “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to those who are bound…” It was this passage that Jesus Christ, at the age of 12, turned to in the temple and read as recorded in Luke 4: 18. He told his listeners that the passage of scripture (from Isaiah) was being fulfilled before their eyes.

For decades now Christians who celebrate Christmas have been complaining about the challenge they face in doing so. The event is drowned out by the gigantic grab for all sorts of material things as encouraged by the advertisements in the media. The joy of the Christ-birth is lost in all of this.

Many judge Christmas on how much food and material things are consumed and assume that this is all there is to the ‘good news to the poor’. We hear reverberations of this theme throughout the year when people say the only way they can be helped is with a certain sum of money. This is understandable among the destitute, especially in the circumstances that caused them to be in such dire need in the first place. The ‘system’ perpetuates inequity in the distribution of the wealth, which itself goes against the message of Christmas.

Exactly 17 years ago, in 1998, when Christmas Eve was on a Thursday, as it is today in this year, the title of my column was ‘Christmas for Christians cannot be ‘salt’ ‘. I wrote that I had been in a very bad car crash the week before and suffered a serious fracture of my left upper arm and was writing with one hand. I was traveling in a taxi on my way to Manchester when the incident occurred in Clarendon.

Writing about this in my column 11 years later on Christmas Eve 2009, which was also a Thursday, the reaction by at least one person writing online was that a motor vehicle crash was not the same as being destitute at Christmas, despite the excruciating pain that I endured. True, but the lack of material things should not take away the joy of Christmas either.

It is possible that the celebration of Christmas might once again be going underground, as in the early church when Christians were being oppressed, what with the violence meted out to them today. True, in many parts of the world, the celebration of Christmas has always been kept underground due to it being banned by law. Indeed, it was not until the 1980s that Christians in Poland were once again free to worship as they did before World War II. But the truth is that, when suppressed, the real Christians tend to shine with more grace and joy than in places where Christianity is allowed to be practised freely.

Although some church denominations do not officially celebrate Christmas, the members do. I have argued for decades, and have written as much many times, that some Seventh-day Adventists and some Jehovah’s Witnesses bake better Christmas puddings and prepare better sorrel drinks than many other Christians who celebrate Christmas.

Who cares that Jesus’s actual birthday was not December 25? The fact that we celebrate the word of the Almighty God appearing in flesh (referred to as the incarnation) on a day during the year should suffice.

And just when some Christians in Jamaica have been trying their best to have the nativity scenes re-enacted in the Christmas season, the United States of America, which so many other nations including Jamaica love to follow, decides that it is against their law to have the nativity scene in schools. I hope that we never copy that action in the way we copy so many of their other follies.

And many who criticise me today because Jesus Christ was not really born on December 25, or that there are too many white-skinned depictions of Jesus Christ while Jesus was not really white (actually Jesus Christ was a Sephardic Jew, so he was perhaps dark brown), will more than likely have some sort of celebration. Indeed, even Santa Claus (Saint Nicholas) was not white either. Bishop Nicholas, who lived in Asia Minor in the fourth century, would not have been Caucasian. But the truths concerning Christianity and its observances were adapted to European culture at some point in time as seen in the ‘whitenness’ of Jesus and many of the early saints.

Perhaps even the Europeans up to the 19th century knew that Jesus was not white. One account of the original version of

Silent Night, as written in 1818 in Germany by Father Joseph Mohr, was: “Silent night, holy night/ All is calm, all is bright/ Just the holy and lonely pair/ Lovely boy-child with curly hair/ Slumbers in heavenly peace.” If this story is correct, is it fair to say that Father Mohr, in writing “with curly hair”, knew that Jesus was not European? I cannot tell for sure.

When the Europeans extended Christianity to other parts of the world it was unfortunately practised originally in the European culture, except where their culture could not communicate the essence of the message such as in the language.

But the greatest news is that Jesus Christ was born to give the good news to the poor. This very good news should be in co-operatives or shared enterprises to empower the poor, not in handouts that make people permanently dependent, which is part of what psychologists refer to as ‘learned helplessness’.

The hymn that gives the real message of Christmas is in the first four lines of the third verse of O Holy Night: “Truly he taught us to love one another/ His law is love and His Gospel is peace/ Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother/ and in His name all oppression shall cease.” The fact is that Jesus Christ not only came to comfort the afflicted, but also to afflict the comfortable.

“Saviour, we greet thee, born this happy morning/ Jesus to thee be all glory given/ Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing/ O come, let us adore Him.” Have a Merry Christmas!

ekrubm765@yahoo.com