It’s Christmas – Our Over-The-Top Reminder About How We Should Be Acting Every Day

You know what kills me about Christmas? It’s supposedly about a guy whose core message was basically: be nice to each other. And somehow we turned that into a full-blown production.

Strip it all down—the theology, the traditions, the ornaments—and the message is embarrassingly simple: love people, don’t be a jerk, share your sandwich. Kindergarten-level ethics. Golden Rule stuff. That’s it.

But apparently, simple makes us uncomfortable.

“Just be kind? That’s the whole deal?  No light show? No miracle? No supporting cast of angels, livestock, and celestial special effects? What am I supposed to do with that?”

So we dressed it up. Virgin births. Choirs of angels. Wise men—who weren’t kings, but astrologers, which didn’t test well with focus groups—following a star that somehow moves, even though the defining feature of stars is that they don’t. But sure. Magic star. Fine.

All this pageantry to deliver a message that fits on a bumper sticker: Don’t be a jerk.

Love your neighbour. Feed the hungry. Take care of people. Done.

Instead, we built a multi-billion-dollar industry out of it. Ceramic figurines. Light-up lawns. Animatronic reindeer. Songs about figgy pudding—whatever that is. No one knows. No one has ever known. We just sing it confidently.

And here’s the masterpiece of irony: we celebrate the birth of a man who told people to give away their possessions by… buying more stuff??“Blessed are the meek, so I got you an iPad.”The guy flipped tables in the temple, and we turned his birthday into Black Friday. That takes commitment.

Meanwhile, the actual point—the quiet, obvious one—gets buried. Be kind. Help people. Don’t be greedy. Share. You don’t need frankincense for that. You don’t need a miracle. You just need to try.

And the sad part? Under all the tinsel and inflatable Santas the size of a Buick, there really is something good there. Something true. Something worth keeping.

Be decent to each other.

That's the whole message. And it's the same message underneath every fight against discrimination, every effort to build inclusive communities, every conversation about human dignity. The details change—racism, homophobia, religious intolerance—but the answer stays the same: treat people like they matter. Because they do.

It's what we work toward every day at The Human Dignity Project. No miracles required. No special effects. Just the simple, hard work of actually living what we claim to believe once a year.

We keep burying that message under layers of stuff, because that's what we do with simple, beautiful ideas—we complicate them until we forget why they mattered in the first place.

Merry Christmas, everybody. Try not to kill each other at the mall.