Articles with Life

The Christmas Dilemma

I never know what to buy people for Christmas.  It’s just two weeks until Christmas, and I still don’t know what to buy for a couple of family members.  Sure, I could always get them a gift card from their favorite store, but what’s the fun in that?  Sometimes it’s easy enough to figure what to buy people.  However, sometimes I can’t figure out what they need or want at a reasonable price.  How many small ticket items do people need?  Can’t I just buy them one really expensive gift and let that be their for the next six Christmases?

Christmas may be losing its meaning amidst all the commercialism.  The frantic search for the perfect gift, the muddling through the crowds at the mall, or the quick online purchase definitely do not define the meaning of Christmas.  Christmas has become overly materialistic and sanitized.  It has been adopted as a national holiday and is observed by people throughout the world who are not Christian.  The focus of Christmas has increasingly shifted towards Santa and what gifts he’ll bring, about families reuniting, about expressing love through a purchased product, and goodwill towards men.  While these are good and noble endeavors, they overshadow Christmas’ true meaning.  Christmas is a birthday celebration for Jesus, a carpenter from the Galilee region born about 4 B.C.  It’s been said that his actual birthday would have been in April based on the timing Roman Census that required his parents to journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem prior to his birth.  That would mean Jesus’ actual birthday would be sometime around Easter.  If Christmas is replaced by Xmas or Winter Break or Happy Holiday then perhaps the observance of Jesus’ birthday should be moved to a day closer to the actual day of his birth.  This would reassert the meaning of the holiday without all the commercialistic trappings of Christmas.  The date of Christmas has much to do with the ancient Druid celebration of Winter Solstice.  Moving the date celebrating Jesus’ birth would put it more in line with celebrating it on the actual date of his birth.

Striking a Balance

Finding a balance in life is hard.  It seems we never have enough time anymore and always have too many things to do.  When someone calls and asks how I’m doing, my standard reply is usually, “Very busy!”  We’re always so busy, busy, busy.  Where does the time go?  Why do I have so much to do?  I suppose that the transition period before moving to Korea exaggerates the amount of work we have to do–moving from an old life to a new life while trying to live day to day.  I keep hoping though that life will be different once we arrive in Seoul and settle in, but who knows.  I may just be someone who thrives on multi-tasking.  I can’t live without that trusty personal digital assistant (PDA) to help manage my schedule.  If something doesn’t get done today, I can always move the deadline out to tomorrow or later.

Sometimes I get nostalgic thinking about the way life used to be.  Life used to be simpler, no doubt about it.  I read somewhere that Americans today work about 80 more hours per year now than they did in the early 1970’s.  In fact, according to the International Labour Organization, Americans work more hours than workers in any other industrialized nation.  It leaves us with a lot less time to do other things outside of work.  Another factor is choice.  We now have so many choices to make, far more than we ever had.  It makes life utterly more complicated.  Take the media, for example.  In the 1970’s our media choices included ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and the local newspaper.  With the advent of cable and the Internet, however, our choices have multiplied infinitely.  Life has become too cluttered.

Do I advocate going back to a simpler time?  No, but I want to simplify my life and strike a better balance.  I want to spend more time with my family and less with a language learning book, more time developing spiritually and less time micro-managing the day to day, and spend more time doing activities and less time in front of a computer.  Can I do it?  Time will tell.

Royalty-free image courtesy of Storyblocks.

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