Confusing Holy Truth with Holiday Tradition

I wanted to post this for a couple reasons.  One, I want to share the work of The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Jesus.  (Anti-Social Behavioral Order…It’s a British thing.)  I visit this artist’s work all the time, and hope you will too. 

***edit:  some recent posts revealing the artist’s ponderings on hell and eternal consequences of sin make me more than a little sceptical about recommending the site.  I’m can’t recommend his point of view on that.  But as always, be careful with what you read, and know that publishing a link doesn’t mean that I fully embrace or absolutely endorse the offsite material.***

I couldn’t get this piece out of my mind, and that leads me to reason two…

Secondly, I wanted to share this because it hits home as we decorate for Christmas.  As we determine what stories to tell, and what decorations to put up, we must be intentional about what traditions are accurately historical, what has Biblical/Christological significance, what has family significance, and what are things that are meaningless fluff.

For instance, we don’t do the Santa Claus thing with our kids (they know).  We don’t put the Little Drummer Boy in the Nativity set.  And for a few years now we haven’t used Christmas stockings.

Here are our kids on decorating day, having plenty of fun with the stuff we didn’t put out.  Yeah, we got all that stuff at one time or another, but now we only want to put the focus on Jesus, where it belongs.  That doesn’t mean that we can’t have some fun! 

We love this picture…we call it “gangsta santa”

 

Who would have thunk it, that those stockings really do fit?