Today we continue our Words From Our Founders series examining our Founding Fathers’ own words on religion, religious liberty, and morality.
Below is an excerpt from Poor Richard’s Almanack by Benjamin Franklin relating to the celebration of Christmas.
“How many observe Christ’s Birth-day! How few, his Precepts! O! ’tis easier to keep Holidays than Commandments.”
Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1743
A Montana school recently received a letter from the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the ACLU threatening possible legal action if the school’s choir members were permitted to voluntarily participate in a community Christmas celebration at a local church.
The school has rightly decided to ignore the threat and let students join in the festivities.
From Alliance Defending Freedom:
“Schools should not have to think twice about whether they can allow choirs to participate in community Christmas events,” said Litigation Staff Counsel Rory Gray. “Courts have unanimously allowed students to sing Christmas carols at school. Nothing changes when they sing the same Christmas songs at a community festival instead. We commend the districts for rightly ignoring the baseless threats delivered by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom From Religion Foundation.”
This latest action by the ACLU and the Freedom From Religion Foundation is yet another in a long series of anti-Christmas (and anti-religion) activities by the groups, including:
In addition to past actions by the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Arkansas has also seen its Christmas celebrations targeted by other atheist groups, including unwarranted controversy over a Nativity display at a school in Paragould and an anti-Christmas display sponsored by the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers on the Arkansas Capitol grounds.
As Christmas approaches, I want to take a moment to reflect on what Christmas really means.
Country music singer-songwriter Johnny Cash wrote a poem several years ago called, “Christmas as I Knew It.” The poem describes Christmastime during the Great Depression—a Christmas that, in Cash’s words, was “kinda lean.”
The gifts his family exchanged consisted of things like a homemade hickory whistle and dresses made from empty flour sacks; Christmas dinner included a squirrel his daddy had killed, and their Christmas tree wasn’t a handsome evergreen; it was a “pigapple” tree decorated with popcorn strings.
The last few stanzas of the poem are especially interesting. Cash writes the sharecroppers across the road “didn’t have it as good as us.” He and his brother took a jar of coal oil and some hickory nuts they had collected over to the sharecropper’s porch. An old lady eased open the door and thanked the boys for the simple gifts as they left.
You would think, with things as hard as they were, Johnny Cash and his family might have felt like their Christmas wasn’t anything all that special. Instead, Cash writes, “for one of the neighbors and for us, it was a good Christmas night.”
Any more, we get bombarded with conflicting messages at Christmastime. One says, “There’s more to Christmas than buying things.” The other says, “Everything is on sale. Buy it for Christmas!” This year, I hope you and I both remember Christmas is a celebration of what God has done for us through His son, Jesus. If we remember that, no matter what’s going on, we too can have “a good Christmas night.”
May your Christmas season be truly blessed and merry.
P.S. As Christmas approaches, I know a lot of worthy causes are contacting you about making a donation to their work before the end of the year. If you value what we do at Family Council, and are able to help, I hope you will consider making a generous, tax-deductible gift of $50 before the year is out. Click here to donate today.