Many people are able to make ends meet by working that extra job around Christmas or get that full time job around or after Christmas. Christmas is the time of season that makes or breaks the retail industry, as well as the grocery stores. Even when the media reports that a store or the industry as a whole is percentage points below the previous year, this is not all bad, because that store still did more volume sales during the Christmas season than any other time of the year.
Whether you are a Santa Claus person or a Jesus person, the holiday is about giving. Santa Claus gives toys and presents to the kids, and Jesus people give toys and presents to the kids and adults because God gave his only son to save the world.
Since I am a devoted follower of Jesus, I love Christmas because of what it stands for. Love.
When you love, you have no problem giving to that person you love not caring whether that person gives back or not. Well, most of us do.
The purpose is to let that person know that God gave his only son because he loved man so much that he set an example to all people that we should be about loving our fellow man. That this is the time of year to not only help our own families but to reach out to others less fortunate than ourselves.
But many of us, including myself, have found that we sometimes take family and others for granted during the year, so Thanksgiving, Christmas and even New Year’s allows us the opportunity to look back and realize just how lucky we are.
I for one will miss my mother this year. It will be the first year without her. I’m going to miss the wild Christmas cards and the long phone conversations. We stopped trying to give each other gifts years ago. Our gifts were giving of ourselves. If you still have your mother or father give them some of your time around these holidays. Stop taking them for granted.
But I also love Christmas because of the great joy it brings to children when they wake up on Christmas morning. To see their faces when they get the many toys and other things they were so looking forward to.
Maybe we as adults should try a little harder to find something we can get that will bring that kind of joy to our adult loved ones, without going broke.
Christmas is truly a wonderful conclusion to the year, and we all should do all we can to make it a happy occasion for all. So I say Merry Christmas to everyone.
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Moving to a less happy topic. The President opened relations with Cuba last week, and it is long overdue. If we can have a working relationship with China, Russia and other Communist countries, why not Cuba? Cuba is not a threat to the U.S. and has never been since President Kennedy stopped the Soviet Union from shipping nuclear weapons to Cuba.
We have had an embargo on Cuba for 54 years, and conditions in Cuba haven’t gotten any better. So if we can open relations, and start trade, like we have with other Communist countries it has to help the masses of people. I’ve never believed that Capitalism is any better than Communism. They both seem to be geared toward the rich getting richer, not the poor or middle class.
The people should be able to select what form of government they have, but it must be set up for the benefit of the masses not the select few, which is the case for both today. For those of us who either remember or have read about Cuba before the revolution, we know that Cuba was ruled by the rich, mostly rich Americans, who used the island as a resort for the rich while almost enslaving the masses of the Cuban people. But it doesn’t appear that the Castro brothers have done anything better for the people. I guess it’s really hard to give up power. But there’s no way should Cuba go back to the way it was before the revolution.
(Ulish Carter is the managing editor of the New Pittsburgh Courier.)
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