By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

To those of us who thought Christmas was too commercialized before, there's no doubt that the phenomenon has set a record in this last year of the 1900s.

Blame it on the economy. It's the best it's ever been, and we're all beginning to expect a higher level of giving, a higher level of spending, a higher level of getting.

Snob appeal is rampant. Collectibles are commanding huge prices for no other reason than that collectors want to be able to boast to other collectors that they have the latest, most popular, least available.

The parties are more lavish, the fake Christmas trees more lifelike and sophisticated, the red and green party clothes finer and their designers more in vogue.

And the oil crisis of the `70s is a dim, distant nightmare. The lights are plentiful and bright, multicolored and white, inside and out, on businesses and private homes.

You take the kids on a nice, old-fashioned hay ride and the only thing old-fashioned is the hay. You fork over eight or ten bucks per child, then at the end you pay another three or four per child for the privilege of participating in a marshmallow roast.

We in the newspaper business certainly can't point any fingers. Newspapers and retail stores are like Native Americans and buffalo. We follow the herd, and since Christmas is their time to feed, it's also ours.

I was trying to get in the last of my shopping the other day, and was a bit frustrated by the traffic. I pulled into one of the big box shopping centers to pick up a picture frame for one person's gift, with the idea of continuing on to the mall. There would be more choices of clothing stores there, I reasoned, and I could wander from store to store looking for just the right blouse or sweater for my mom.

But the traffic was so thick that it was going to take probably a half hour to go the remaining two miles to the mall, so I picked up my picture frame at the home style store, and then ducked next door into one of only two clothing stores in the big box center, just to see what they might have.

I walked in the door and was amazed to find just the thing, a beautiful blazer, on sale, perfectly suited to Mother. The store's arranger had placed it on the very first rack, not six inches inside the door, and the first one on the rack was the right size.

I reached into my pocket and happily handed the clerk some of the dollars that this booming economy and the retail community had deposited there, tickled down to my toes to have found the right gift.

Sure, Christmas can be too commercial. But whether it is or it isn't is really up to you and me, isn't it? It's what's in our hearts, not what's in our wallets, that makes Christmas what it is.

And, of course, often lost in the noise of the two-for-one sales and the disco lights competition between neighbors is the central theme, the celebration of the birth of Jesus, the Christ.

But I maintain that criticizing “the world” for drowning out the true meaning of Christmas with gift-giving and gift-getting, parties and merriment is a waste of breath. Better to use that breath singing praises than cursing those who don't.

As an aside, I would really love to see Christians get together and come up with a reasonably accurate estimate as to when Christ really made his immaculate entrance into the world, and celebrate the event closer to that time. Best guesses by experts are that it was sometime in June or July, I've read.

Christians started celebrating Christmas in the winter to appease newly converted Greeks, Romans and Anglo Saxons, who wanted to continue their previous religious traditions of merrymaking around the time of winter solstice.

No reason we couldn't separate by a few months the sacred from the profane in this day and age.

But as long as we continue to wrap it all into one big old warm, fuzzy blanket, it's still up to those who believe in Jesus to honor him and to give him first place at Christmas, and all the time.

Hope you and yours have a blessed Christmas.

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