Native-ivity

I don't know if it has been created before me but I have made a new word: Native-ivity. This is the tendency to make the things that man has added to the original Nativity, the things that we really love about Christmas. For us who struggle with Native-ivity, Christmas is about the things native or natural to us that we love about Christmas: family traditions, holiday trimmings, buying presents, Christmas specials, etc. It is a personal picture of the perfect Christmas. Therefore the whole season can be frustrating for those of us with Native-ivity because we cannot make it like we would like to. How Mary and Joseph must have related. The Nativity scene depicted in little ceramic or wooden sets were certainly not the images they intended for the first Christmas. Talk about a rough Christmas...do you think Joseph envisioned a stable for the birth of God with 20 gawking Shepherds?

For me, Native-ivity sufferer that I am, I struggle with the fact that my kids are so much older now. The Christmas wish list is about clothes and money and no fun items. I have no toys to put together. I have no tents, model trains, or bicycles to create a visual impact for the Christmas morning palooza. Things are changing and Native-ivity is bringing me down a little during this most wonderful time of the year.

As some of the things that made Christmas special are slowly dissolving in the sands of time it is easy to feel a range of emotions from sadness to depression to outright anger. In fact some of us are trying to force Christmas to be what we want it to be. Family members are feeling pressure from us to conform to the perfect Christmas picture that Native-ivity has created in our minds. The success of the present Christmas in some ways is threatened by the success of the past ones.

But it is important to remember some things if Native-ivity with all of its symptoms has set in. First, the past is always remembered more fondly than what it really was. Secondly the present is often thought of less positively than what it really is. Thirdly, there is no guarantee that what you will experience in the future won't be better than what you have experienced before. And lastly, the point of the whole thing is The Nativity, something that a serious case of Native-ivity will often hide or at least obscure. Don't let what isn't this Christmas keep you from experiencing what is and will always be...today in the town of Bethlehem a savior has been born to you and he is Christ the King!