WE usually plan for Christmas, but the reality of our personal world as we know it is spinning on a different axis, challenging our very efforts to reach out and engage in the holiday’s customs in the accustomed way. So I turn to the mystery of Christmas itself to explore its principles, and I found the first challenge in a conversation that was inevitable for me to hear.

In the minibus that was taking me home, a lady sitting next to me said, “I gon be Scrooge this Christmas. I ent buying nothing fuh nobody.” I looked at her, and she kind of read my thoughts, but in truth, there was nothing to be said. We were two strangers, and her gaze was directed at her lady friend next to her, though its content reached almost everyone who heard it. But it was her expression, and so I shrugged my shoulders. The fellow next to me just shook his head.

“Was the business places that used to carry the Santa thing, back in the day, some churches too, carol singers and suh, masquerade band during the day, but them Christmas gifts was always stress. The cinemas helped, remember all them James Bond and cowboy movies were launched on Christmas Eve night. Toy guns had names like Apache, Frontier 45, and suh, and Christmas Eve night always had a new movie opening, everybody [mostly young me] going into the cinema with a 25-cent cap gun, from the cinema then to home to help out, or be bored. One thing was standard: pepper pot, and fruit cake fuh de new morning.”

I drifted off and refocused on my initial intention to explore the Christmas story. I have done some reading and exploration of alternative views on religion, whether true or false, or borrowed from older mystery systems. When all is said and done, religion is entwined with how we view the principles that embody right and wrong, and when Christianity is used for dark purposes by man-made hierarchies, the human consciousness rebels and unravels the truth in the relevant context. But that was where my thoughts were bound.

What I was recapturing were thoughts that revolved around the birth of a child; that mystical kings visited with serene gifts, promising a better day through this birth; and, upon seeing adulthood, that moment when so many children were slain. Be it true or construed, it is difficult to judge completely, but we can explore. In exploring this story, it seemed to have occurred in diverse religious places, but with some it was more engaging than with others.

The Christmas story should be explored in the context of its human world, as it was then and as it is today, in the context of the mental usurpations of logic and obvious principles, which are also rooted in the message and value systems of the Christmas story. This story of the Christ birth is one that requires comparisons with how we live and judge our own values, and how we translate its values into a more relevant event in current human understanding, without religious distortions but with mundane execution, challenging our own corners of human reasoning—so have a good Christ