where are you, Christmas?

I think i can hear its heart beating, stifled under 600 pounds of monotonously festive tinsel and post-consumer wrapping paper. Listen--can you hear it singing, reduced to semi-tones underneath the smooth jazz bubbling from consumer-infested department stores?

Christmas-- that delectably frost-bitten time of year when brotherly love and contagious empathy smother political dissonance with solicitude and generosity; when Wal-Mart greeters are fatally trampled by an amicable mob in its frantic attempt to attain this season's Tickle Me Elmo.

Ah, Christmas.

How have we created from what should be sacred such an autotheistic festival of ourselves? What should be a celebration of our weakness-- our need of a savior-- has become a monument to our narcissism. Soft and low are the cries of "O Come All Ye Faithful"; more urgently is sung the jaunty tale of an ethnically diverse reindeer and his clique of shallow silver-hooved friends. America does not want a Savior. America wants to be the Prefect of its own party; dead wasted, partially numb and covered in twelve feet of gold tinsel.

Raucously, ridiculously, the birthday celebration of the King of Israel has been mutilated in honor of an overweight man (with an irrationally buoyant team of mythical creatures) who satisfies the short-lived material desires of children who are more likely to be encouraged in their "child-like faith" in Frosty the Snowman than the priceless, martyred gift of their Creator.

If you don't listen closely, you might miss the heartbeat singing quietly under the scrappage: the heartbeat of a premature and inconsequential Jewish baby, a heart that never stops beating. Your heart beats because His did. Are you listening?