It’s Christmas time! For you, this might be a time to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, enjoy time with friends and family, or listen to Christmas music.

But it probably also means spending money on gifts, decorations, and food. There is no doubt that Christmas means commercialism and consumerism, at least to some extent. Is this a bad thing? Is money causing us to forget the true meaning of Christmas?

Joy Pullmann at Values and Capitalism ponders this question. She believes that money can be a tool for people to sin:

While money is not itself evil, people do a lot of stupid and evil things with it—such as driving themselves crazy following the stores into Christmas right after Halloween. It’s really hard to enjoy Christmas, a wedding or a life, if the celebration is consumed entirely by stuff, rather than using stuff to complement the reasons we celebrate. It’s the difference between buying to give or employ over buying just to buy.

At the same time, she notes, many people go to the other extreme and stop celebrating holidays like Christmas to avoid all the materialism. This, too, can be harmful by causing us to forget Jesus Christ the real reason for the holiday.

Pullmann concludes,

As always, the fault lies not with tools such as money or gifts, but with how our broken souls abuse them.

Money isn’t the problem; our hearts are. And that’s why Jesus came to earth as a baby in a manger.

This year, how can we put our focus what makes Christmas meaningful? Leave your comments here.