Are you ever tempted to just give up on Christmas? I know I am. The season is exploited to ridiculous extremes in pretty much every arena of marketing. Retailers try to get shoppers in the Christmas mood sometime around, oh, February (to keep them open post-Valentine's Day, I guess). TV stations inundate viewers with all of the sappy holiday shows from Halloween on, it seems (coming up next..."The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown," followed by "A Charlie Brown Christmas").

Oh that we could keep Christmas around a few weeks -- or months -- longer, some would say. It's a time of purity, innonence, and selflessness, right? Not anymore. In recent news has been Abercrombie & Fitch's decision to pull its holiday catalog, which featured perversions of all kinds by kids in Santa hats. And then there are groups like the ACLU, whose soul Christmas gift to the world seems to be ridding it of mangers and angels and donkeys and Marys and Josephs and ESPECIALLY incarnate deities.

Some innocence. Bah, humbug.

But I'm no Grinch. Underneath the boxes and bows of commercialism, and somewhere behind the church-state lawsuits, there still lies the glibly labeled "real meaning" of Christmas. We seem to forget that the "real meaning" of our winter holiday is also the real meaning of life itself: our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and His rescue mission to earth.

Christmas isn't just about the cliched blue-eyed baby tucked carefully in a perfectly lain straw pile. (Maybe the ACLU's right; maybe the typical Nativity scenes should go. We can do much better.) Christmas is about the most powerful being in the universe, tucked into a small, human body -- a voice that could calm a storm reduced to a child's whimper for food. The fate of the world placed in the tiniest of hands. Next time you see a manger scene, maybe the appropriate response is to echo John the Baptist, and say, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world."

The Holiday-tree tradition is long-standing. It dates back to Germany in the 16th century, a dark age when the remote control had not been invented and the Holiday Bowl wasn't even played yet. The evergreens were meant to symbolize the Paradise Tree in the Garden of Eden, and it was a religious extremist named Martin Luther who first had the idea of decorating them with lights. In England, meanwhile, people began giving Holiday gifts to one another in remembrance of a story involving Three Wise Men.

All of this started a several-centuries-long period when Holiday was closely associated with the birth of an obscure Middle Eastern religious figure whose name now escapes me, although it would probably show up in a Google search.