The buzz this year is Target booting the Christmas Tree and introducing the ‘holiday tree’. That and 5 million other companies saying ‘happy holidays’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas’. Last year, it was thousands of cities taking down their traditional manger scenes.

These kind of things drive some Catholics batty, but many people fail to see the underlying problem. It’s not so much the taking Christ out of Christmas as taking Christ out of life in general.

Yes, it’s true that the Church set December 25 th aside to honor the birth of Christ. But it’s also true that this was in answer to a deep rooted pagan holiday (as the Jehovah Witnesses love to point out). What’s happening now is rebellion…pure and simple.

Christians took away the enemy’s playground, and now he’s trying to take it back. There’s only one way to fight this. The fuzzy feeling we seek when we blatantly say “Merry Christmas” won’t move the front line one inch (not that I’m saying we shouldn’t say ‘Merry Christmas’). It doesn’t call for a change (or conservation0 in terminology. The problem calls for a change in life.

The world will behave like a Christian world when it is a Christian world. That doesn’t mean Church or community leaders enforcing Christian doctrine. It means Christians (us) living Church doctrine. It means raising a family to embrace charity and reject evil…and not apologizing for it. It means living the Christmas spirit every day of the year…not just on December 25 th