The Spirit of Christmas

Let's give what we can

One of the most important parts of Christmas is to be hospitable to your family, friends, loved ones, and everyone else. It is a time for all of us to give extra compassion and understanding, especially to those we differ from. Something that I think is often unrecognized about Christmas these days is that Jesus was Jewish. Of course, when we celebrate Christmas, we are acknowledging the Christian religion and its values, but we are also celebrating a holiday based on someone who was Jewish. To me, that’s what being Christian means; accepting everyone into our love and celebrations, no matter their background or views. I feel that a lot of people forget that. In my genealogy studies I learned that according to western and ancient middle eastern genealogy, we are all descended from Jews. I feel that a lot of people forget that too. 

I was going to talk more about why the spirit of Christmas is so important when I got a news headline in the middle of writing this. It was about Elon Musk and Twitter. I didn’t even get halfway through the article before my mind was blown. It was a USA Today article titled “The Claim. With $40 billion, Elon Musk could have given everyone in the U.S. $1 million” and in the second paragraph, it described how Musk could give 330 million Americans a million dollars and still have $7B left over*. If the real spirit of Christmas is giving, why don’t all of these billionaires try to end poverty by giving their money to the cause? If a few of them teamed up and put in a few million dollars even, they could help the 37.5 million people in our country who are living in poverty. They are so rich that they could even give some to the middle class, and help get this country out of debt. As quickly as it took for the big bang theory to create the universe, which was in the blink of an eye, they could end poverty in America. That would be the best Christmas recorded in history, and really show the proper ‘giving’ spirit. Happy holidays everybody!

*Correction: the rest of the article went on to say that this was a misleading number. Read the exact data here.