Who is Keeping Christ out of Christmas?
By Cheri Loveless

Editor’s Note: Have you noticed?  How couldn’t you notice – how the Christmas cards, gift wrap, and vernacular continue to change season by season, diminishing the spiritual significance of the holiday, mitigating messages related to the actual birth of Christ?

Consider the Christmas cards you've browsed recently: full of bright-colored geometric shapes, snowflakes, mesmerizing fires, and nostalgic chestnutty scenes with wishes of “good cheer” replacing the real invitation to celebrate the birth of the Savior of the World.  Wrapping paper and gift bags follow suit.  Many among us take note, but buy it anyway.  It matches. 

Cheri Loveless, Provo mother of 8, writer, co-founder of Mothers at Home, did more than take notice.  After an evolutionary ten years as she was raising her children, Cheri embarked on a new business to create Christ-themed wrapping paper for Christmas.  

Meridian asked Cheri to describe her journey through Christmases past and the impetus behind her new wrapping paper designs that feature Christ’s birth. (hyperlink www.firstchristmasgiftwrap.com ).

I can’t remember a time I didn’t feel a struggle to keep Christ in Christmas.

As a young mom, in mid-1970’s Washington, D.C., our holiday was pretty much an appendage to my parents’.  A boisterous gathering of relatives, with children underfoot in every room, the centerpiece was ever my father as gift master – revealing in his best broadcast news voice whose treasure he was about to hand over from under the tree.  Eventually, drowsy with stomachs stretched with the proscribed holiday meal, some of us snuggled up in front of the bedroom television set to watch Jimmy Stewart help Clarence get his wings (the girls) while others chose the TV nearest the food source and offered critiques of football plays (the boys).

We wouldn’t have traded it for the world.

Yet, on-duty in my own small living room, with a fairly naked Christmas tree and no extra funds for a fitting holiday home makeover, I began to worry about whether my children realized Who Christmas was all about.  I wasn’t even certain I appreciated Who Christmas was all about.  After all, the Christmas season had been growing unfriendly to the One whose name it bears long before I became a mother.

The Christmas music of my childhood was already straying from carols towards clever lyrics about Santa, snowmen, and shopping.  Stores proclaimed “Xmas” sales so regularly that my junior high school friends and I adopted the term without a second thought.  Letters from the school district to our teachers, formally denouncing use of the term “Christmas” and cautioning against classroom holiday festivities with religious overtones, began circulating shortly after my graduation from high school. 1

I felt no need to become unduly solemn or to remove the fun of the season from my children’s lives.  But the blatant consumerism bothered me, as did the pressure to orchestrate a seamless flow of Christmas activities that had little to do with God’s gift of His Son.  So my husband and I increased our efforts towards a Christ-centered approach to Christmas.

We tried hanging a stocking for baby Jesus and making birthday promises to Him for the coming year.  We collected nativities, though our budget has always been so modest that we mostly admire but do not own.  Gathering around the piano to sing a particular Christmas carol 2 that rejoices in Christ’s coming is still one of my favorite moments on Christmas Eve, as is reading and/or watching different renditions of “A Christmas Carol” (which often launches a rich holiday discussion of what becoming Christ-like might mean).  Donning costumes to enact our own version of the original Christmas story has enjoyed varying degrees of success, depending on the ages of the participants and the sincerity of those with major parts.

I was surprised when secular discomfort with Christmas took a political turn in the form of lawsuits over where a public Nativity scene can be placed. 3  Yet as much of concern to me is the slow but steady drifting away from Christmas as the birth story of Christ, the subtle distancing that is so easy for me, or any other devoted Christian, to embrace.

For instance, exchanging “Merry Christmas” with the more politically correct “Happy Holidays” made sense to me in the festive atmosphere of our Washington, D.C. holidays where many of our friends and neighbors who celebrated Christmas were Jewish or agnostic.  However, a decade later I was appalled when I stopped at Target for a box of Christmas cards and, along an aisle that must have been 25 feet long, I could not find a single card that acknowledged the birth of Christ in any form.  When I asked the manager about it, he responded with clear sincerity that Christmas cards with symbols of the Nativity “might offend someone.”  The store was located in Orem, Utah.

Only recently, when I was pointing out to my husband that homeowners seemed to be using more colored lights this year, did I realize that the brilliant reds and greens from the Christmas décor of my youth – symbols of Christ’s blood and the eternal nature of His sacrifice – had nearly disappeared in favor of the drab white already pressed upon us by the weather.  

Of course, Santa, the bringer of gifts first seen on TV and soon left untouched under the bed or in the closet, has completely overshadowed the Bringer of eternal and life-changing Gifts. 4  I remember well the struggle between not wanting to disappoint my children while choosing gifts that were more needful, more affordable, and more meaningful than what they were enticed to place on their wish lists.

Christmas, as we know, was from its Roman beginnings, a holiday at the mercy of secular celebration.  And perhaps that strong link with a general time of year when people want to “live it up” or reconnect with friends or return “home for the holidays” has actually infused it with a longevity it might not have enjoyed otherwise.

In a similar way, I think, my parents’ Christmas gathering worked true Christmas magic.  It was likely anticipated each year in a different way, not only by different age groups or genders or personality types, but by each of us as we grew.  Whether we came longing for a new bicycle or looking forward to a chat with a favorite cousin or dreading the kitchen work that, it turns out, established a life-long treasured friendship with an aunt, good things were happening and those good things were associated with a holiday we knew had to do with Jesus Christ.

For some reason, over the years, wrapping paper became a measure for me of how far our culture was departing from a Christmas celebration of the Savior’s birth.  I had begun to wrap Santa gifts in Santa paper and wanted a clear contrast for my other gifts.  Every year, gift wrap with some reference to the Nativity became harder to find.  And it definitely became harder to like.  I rarely found paper that treated the birth of Jesus Christ with the “right” spirit, with a measure of the gratitude I feel for the very personal role he has played in my life.

One year I budgeted to buy wrapping paper at a more expensive local store that carries religious gifts.  When I discovered the same selection of candy cane and Santa gift wrap available elsewhere, I commented to a woman standing next to me.  She turned out to be the store’s buyer.  She explained that Christmas wrapping paper that is obviously Christian is generally not offered in wholesalers’ catalogs.

That was the day I decided our family would someday produce the Christmas wrapping paper I had been looking for.  It would never be available otherwise, I realized – not because of some kind of plot to push Christ out of Christmas, but because I (like most everyone else) wasn’t strong enough yet in my search for that kind of spiritual connection.  We are all usually too busy producing, selling, and purchasing things we hope will give us something else at Christmastime.

Editor’s Note:  To see or purchase Cheri’s First Christmas gift wrap click here.

The long-awaited family business, First Christmas, LLC, was launched in October 2009 after months of work that began with a BYU “Women Entrepreneurs” lecture and the encouragement of a professor who felt the product would be successful.  Presenting elegantly designed and meaningful Christ-themed wrap as "an outward expression of the Savior's ultimate gift," Cheri’s website includes three “first offerings” – the Star of Bethlehem, shepherds abiding, Christ is born – with price reductions for pre-Christmas visitors.  It also contains articles and ideas for “keeping Christmas well” and invites suggestions for new designs and upcoming products that will facilitate keeping the focus on Christ.

Cheri insists that the designs offered by First Christmas are not attempting a return to any past “look;” rather, she is trying to make available something rarely seen before.  “I want to portray Christ’s birth with the joy and beauty it deserves,” she says.  “And that can be done in any language that reaches the human heart, including art that is compatible with today’s design styles.”

Not unlike the shepherds of old, many of us strive to protect our “flocks” and find ways to gather them and to bring them home.  The symbols and traditions that are ours at Christmas, from the gifts and their wrap to the measure of the love we meet and the conversations we have about Christ, are ways we can continue to keep our children centered on the birth, life, and sacrifice of the Savior of the World – keeping them gathered, bringing them Home.

In Cheri's words, " I’m just trying to add to an extremely important and fun celebration an aspect of reflection, even awe, and above all, joy.   Over the years it has become more clear to me, certainly more sure, that it's impossible to keep Christ out of Christmas if you really want Him there."