Do you have a light-fingered or a de-lighted approach to seasonal exterior decorating? Lately I've noticed a much more de-lighted approach because of the rather steep rise in our electricity costs this past year.  It's too bad because I really love to look at all the Christmas lights.  Christmas lights somehow connect me with the little gasping morsel of child-likeness that I am struggling to keep on life support.

That being the case, I am ever so thankful for those, forget-the-cost holdouts, who still light up our city with their heavy Watts of Wonder.  There’s one section of the city where we happen to have several of those homes. These few neighbors really get into the spirit of things and if you’re there at midnight you can still read a newspaper, even though you’re a few hundred yards down the street! You always know when it's Christmas time in that area because all the neighbourhood cats wear sunglasses during their nocturnal prowlings!

Anyway, I share all this with you to point out the one unique part of their litany of lights. On one particular balcony, they have an alien dressed in a Santa suit.  Now when I say alien, I mean ALIEN! We’re talking about the kind of alien whom you see on all those cheesy alien autopsy shows.  Interesting, isn't it?  If you were quickly walking by, you might think it a pasty Grinch who has lost some of it's green, but if you stop to look at it, you can't miss the fact that this particular character isn't really part of any Christmas fable or folklore.  This being the case, I can only conclude that this household has chosen to include an alien in a Santa suit as part of a deliberate statement about Christmas—unless of course, they just really like aliens! 

What do you think their message might be?  Are they suggesting that Santa is part of an alien plot to repopulate the world with "his kind"?  That certainly would be "clause" for panic wouldn't it?  Perhaps they think that his sleigh is a high-tech gadget to increase the greenhouse effect worldwide and thus change our climate into something approximating his home planet?  Somehow I really don't think that's it, but you never know—after all, Santa's helpers do look like short Vulcans —FASCINATING!

I think that, like any great artist, these people have left the interpretation up to the beholder.  So here are the interpretations I take from this novel nativity scene.

To me it makes perfect sense to suggest that Santa is an alien.  Let's face it; Santa IS alien to the true meaning of Christmas.  Christmas is about peace, not price tags.  It's about Goodwill, not Visa bills. It's about Holy, Holy, Holy, not HO, HO, HO!

Maybe the alien Santa is a symbol of how Christmas is becoming increasingly alienated in our culture.  Lately there’s been a big controversy in our city about the governments desire to be more "sensitive".  Many have decided to call the Christmas tree placed downtown, a "Holiday tree" and—heaven forbid—they should wish you a “Merry Christmas” when you do your “holiday” shopping.  The recent uproar this has created, though, has been encouraging.  Still, Christmas is quickly becoming an unwelcome holiday in our supposedly tolerant society.

Perhaps the message I choose to take most from this alien image is just how alien the Christmas message is to our world.  In fact, I believe the true message of Christmas is so alien that we can't help ourselves from changing it.  We can't help but make it into something more understandable (secular, material, commercial).  The Christmas message states that God cared enough for us that He sent His Son into the world as one of us, so that He would experience life through our eyes and then, ultimately, be murdered by us, for our own good!  Who of us would knowingly give up all we have to become less then we are to help those who would ultimately kill us?  This kind of sacrificial love is still very alien to our world and yet it is this otherworldly love that has the power to make us truly human, as God intended.  Go figure!

The next time you see strange lights in the sky; don't think Santa, or little green men.  Remember the star that shone so long ago to signal the fact that a divine visitor had come into this world—not to enslave it, or rearrange it, or even probe it.  This visitor came to save it—FASCINATING!

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