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Category: Christmas

That Christmas Advert

OK, perhaps not that Christmas Advert

Over the last two years society has increasingly looked at the state of the nation’s finances on both a macro and a micro level.  We are starting to see a relationship between the prosperity of the country and the way in which people treat the money in their pockets.  People are examining the causes of our current financial state and finding that people were spending money they didn’t have on things that they perceived that they needed because external pressure was applied to them.  The systems increasingly indoctrinated people into using credit to buy trinkets and gadgets to prove their worth to the world around them or the value of their love to another.

I regularly listen to the radio throughout the day whilst I am working and the above advert is played regularly.  Its catchy format lends it to audio as well as video by capitalizing on the old song by Terry Scott, “My Bruvva”.  Yesterday on the blog I tried to articulate something about the way in which Christmas could still inspire us to change the world.  With this in mind it is with sadness that I am confronted with the old world order every twenty minutes throughout the day.  Nothing says ‘I love you’ like a child induced guilt trip over an X-Box, 0% finance and crippling debts for… my lovely, lovely mother.

Now that’s the real meaning of Christmas :-/

The Nativity | Worship Idea

St Paul’s Art’s and Media in New Zealand have produced a new Nativity video.  I showed their old one last week and everyone loved it.

The Digital Nativity | Worship Idea

I don’t speak Portuguese. I don’t think you have to…

[UPDATE!]  It is now the english version!  Thank you so much Tronis!! [/Update]

Have a Subversive Christmas

There is an interesting article in The Guardian entitled “Red Mary” that seeks to highlight the disparity between The Church’s fluffy Christmas message and that of the events it attempts to represent.  Jonathan Bartley contrasts the words of Mary in the magnificat declaring that The Lord “has brought down rulers from their thrones” and “lifted up the humble” to the point where the Magi are rebranded as “Kings”.  Once the church and state became entwined, Bartley argues, much has been reimagined “to create a close association with power, rather than a challenge to it”.  Have we now removed the world-changing challenges that the Christ Child brings and instead rebranded and sanitized the fuzzy Christmas as “the “Little Lord Jesus”, so gentle, meek and mild”.

Those who really understand Mary’s take on the nativity will realise that Jesus’s birth is not just good news for the oppressed, but a threat to all those who seek to restrict and control. It tells us that those who crusade for Christmas will end up losing the very festival they would defend.