"The Silly Season"
by Tom Goodman
December 21, 2005

The answers are “6:00 p.m.” and “10:30 a.m.” and 10:30 a.m.”

Now, here are the questions:

      “When is the Christmas Eve Service?”  (6:00 p.m.)

      “When is the Christmas Day Service?”  (10:30 a.m.)

      “When is the New Year’s Day Service?”  (10:30 a.m.)

Perfect score!  Yes, for the next two Sundays, we’ll start our worship services early because we won’t meet for Sunday School.  Join us at 10:30 a.m. on the Lord’s Day these holiday Sundays!

Since you did so well on my pop quiz, try your hand at John Leo’s “Christmas Quiz.”  Leo is a columnist and editor for U.S. News & World Report.  His “Christmas Quiz” can be found here.  Poking fun at our politically-correct world, he wrote, “The ‘winter program’ at Ridgeway Elementary School in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, changed the lyrics of the Christmas carol ‘Silent Night’ to the more inclusive ‘Cold in the Night.’  (“Cold in the night, no one in sight, winter winds whirl and bite.”)  After this success, the program’s next step will obviously be changing  ‘O Holy Night’ to ‘Uh-oh! Wholly Night!’ — a song about a lunar eclipse.  Also, he suggested (with tongue firmly planted in cheek) that red and green cookies strongly suggests the divisive sectarian feast day of Christmas, so schools should send home a memo that red cookies may be brought to school, and green ones, too—but not on the same day.  Furthermore, he advised that Christmas trees must now be called either “inclusion bushes,” “trees of color,” or “those pointy green things with needles and lights.”  And the “Wise Men” should now be called “Persons of Wisdom” in order to avoid offense.

It’s fun to highlight the oversensitive silliness we see around us, especially in our own city.  Clearly, we cannot expect our schools, our neighborhood associations, or our city agencies to pass along the real Christmas story to future generations.

Then again, we should not expect them to do so.  That’s our job as believers.  So, roll your eyes at the antics of the “sensitivity police” who keep Austin weird.  But roll up your sleeves, too, because there’s work to be done!  A world needs to know about the Christmas Gift God has sent them.  Teach your children, remind your grown kids of their upbringing, serve in your church, support our missionaries, and love your neighbors.

See you this weekend!  O come, let us adore him!

—Tom