Merry Christmas To All My Readers and Now Let’s Talk About What We’re Actually Celebrating,
The holiday named after Jesus may be the most thorough contradiction of everything he taught.
Let me be direct: Christmas, as currently practiced, is a capitalist holiday dressed in spiritual clothing. And the remarkable thing is how little resistance this generates from the very people who claim Jesus as the center of their faith.
Jesus repeatedly emphasized the release of all attachments — including, and especially, material ones. The holiday bearing his name has become the single largest annual celebration of materialism in the Western world. These two things are so diametrically opposed that they should have nothing to do with each other. That they remain fused together is a testament to how thoroughly his actual teachings have been set aside by the tradition built in his name.
What an Authentic Celebration Would Look Like
A day genuinely honoring Jesus would look nothing like what happens on December 25th. It would be a day when people call someone they’ve long held a grievance with and make peace. When they tell someone they love them. When they give to someone who is genuinely suffering. When they consciously accept their unity with all of humanity and surrender to the Holy Spirit for guidance.
Not a PS5.
The practices currently associated with Christmas — the gifting, the consumption, the commercial spectacle — would be far more honestly celebrated on the Fourth of July, a holiday that already accurately reflects this country’s defining values: capitalism and materialism, unapologetically. Move the traditions there. They fit.
What would remain on December 25th could then become something genuinely powerful: a annual, public, collective practice of forgiveness, reconciliation, generosity toward the poor, and conscious unity with others. It would also function as a revealing mirror — because anyone hesitating or outright refusing to participate in those practices would have a useful moment of self-examination on their hands. How faithfully are you actually following the teachings you so proudly claim as your identity?
The Measure of Faith Is Not the Declaration
What makes someone a genuine follower of Jesus is not proclaiming love for him or declaring him lord and savior — for many, that falls into pure lip service. It is whether they follow his explicit instructions for triggering the spiritual ascension he described: the interior awakening he called heaven, the Kingdom of God within. If every December 25th produced an enormous wave of people genuinely experiencing that shift by following his straightforward set of practices, it would be incomparably more meaningful than whatever new console is released that year.
While We’re Here: Gospel Music Deserves the Same Critique
This same misalignment plays out every Sunday in church. Gospel music should be an unstoppable artistic force — weaving the core teachings and metaphysical insights of Jesus into songs that guide entire congregations toward spiritual ascension. What it largely delivers instead is an endlessly repeated variation on “I love Jesus” and “He is my lord and savior,” without reinforcing the practices he actually pointed people toward.
You rarely hear gospel lyrics reminding people to declare their oneness with all of humanity, to forgive specific people, or to invoke the Holy Spirit directly for guidance. That absence is not incidental. Gospel music centered on the worship and praise of Jesus reflects the same institutional distortion that transformed him from enlightened teacher into deity — a transformation he never endorsed. When people praised and worshiped him during his lifetime, he shut it down immediately, redirecting attention with characteristic humility: “Why do you call me good? Only God is good.”
Authentic gospel music would sound like his teachings in lyric form: loving others, forgiving others, yielding to the Holy Spirit, relinquishing control, caring for the least among us, and affirming our unity as brothers and sisters. Imagine a song whose entire purpose was to ask the Holy Spirit to dissolve every illusion of separation between us — lyrics like “I accept my unity with all my neighbors, we are family.” Music aimed at that target, heard every Sunday by millions, could do something the current form almost never manages: actually move people toward the awakening Jesus described.
That would be worth celebrating.
I’ve touched on numerous topics this Christmas article but the TLDR is:
- Make Jesus Day (Christmas) the day we all collectively as a species perform his teachings no matter how hard they may be. Any push back to forgive is your ego, that includes forgiving someone who hurt you. You should have no beefs or grievances by the end of December 25th.
- Move all the materialistic practices currently practiced on Christmas to July 4th, the day symbolizing our country the best. I’m being slightly tongue in cheek here but the point is this. If those sort of things are going to happen, they shouldn’t be happening on a day that completely contradicts what Jesus taught. It’s a tad ironic that people get livid and indignant about terms like ‘Happy Holidays’ being floated around in December, but aren’t even engaging in the very practices he taught.
- There needs to be a shift in Christian music as a whole from lyrics that currently focus on worship of Jesus, to instead worshiping God the Father as he instructed, while also reinforcing the ideas that he taught.. Forgiving others, invoking the holy spirit, celebrating and accepting unity with others even those who aren’t exactly like us, relinquishing all control to our father and source, etc. The list goes on. This will not only reinforce the ideas that Jesus taught in the minds of Christians everywhere but it will help them practice them. There is certainly a shortage of modern Christian pastors that spend a lot of time teaching those same ideas to their parishioners.. It is either politics or spending time worshiping Jesus which he did not instruct or command
- Mainstream Christianity has done such a good deviating Christians from the actual teachings of Jesus that they think that Jesus taught them to worship him, when he never made such a claim, in fact he explicitly deflected that worship as soon as it was received, which truly solidified him as someone who was egoless and one with all. An achievement that all can experience including yourself, as the experience of being “one with god” was not exclusive to him but is attained the moment you awaken to oneness with the universe, aka heaven, enlightenment, or any of the numerous names given to this very real metaphysical experience in which you completely transcend your ego. The fact that the topic of spiritual awakening and terms like ego are rarely heard in Modern Christianity is a testament to the fact that they are completely disconnected to what Jesus taught. As Jesus was always teaching all of us how to transcend and awaken from our egos. To experience that euphoric bliss of an egoless existence now, not when we die despite what your favorite minister has incorrectly taught you. These very real teachings and consequences of his teachings are what now get dismissed as new age or mysticism in modern Christianity which just further illustrates that Christianity in its current form has little to nothing to do with Jesus. We can change that folks. Let go of all religion, all religious affiliations, accept the fact that we are all one, not separated by artificial man made labels/factions, etc. A true follower of Jesus lets go of religious labeling and instead chooses to just follow the teachings/practices he laid out. Our egos desperately want to feel like we are part of some unique club that separates us from others but we are not separate from others. We are all in fact literally one. This realization will hopefully shut down any political movements that seek to separate and draw borders between ourselves and others. For a country whose Christians claim this is a Christian state, they cannot say this while also endorsing political policies that push out people who aren’t exactly like them, which unequivocally violate the most basic teachings of Jesus.
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