It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

It’s only 21 days until Christmas. Are you excited yet? This year, I’ve been excited for Christmas since July. Let me explain why.

I had the interesting experience of being in a Muslim-majority country over the Islamic festival of Eid-al-Fitr this summer. Now, there are certainly significant differences between the months of Ramadan (no eating or drinking between sunrise and sunset) and Advent (“Woohoo! Chocolate every morning!”). But the whole run-up to Eid certainly felt very festive—a sort of bizarre, very sweaty, Christmas.

All through the month of Ramadan, the shops were rammed with frantic shoppers buying gifts, clothes and food. The pavements were blocked with countless stalls that had sprung up to cash in on the holiday shopping.

Eid shopping brought with it manic Eid traffic. This culminated in a mass exodus out of the capital, as people went home to their family villages (but not without first sitting in traffic jams in battered coaches for hours). When the jams finally cleared, it left the sudden relief of lighter traffic around the now sparsely populated city.

Then there was the Eid TV—hours and hours of special talkshows, musical performances, variety acts and soap operas.

No wonder a familiar complaint was often grumbled: “Eid has become so commercialised now.”

With all of this, Eid had me bewildered. I asked one Christian:

“So, what exactly are people celebrating?”

“The end of Ramadan.”

“But why are they celebrating the end of the holy month?”

“Well, if you’d been fasting for a month, you’d be celebrating too.”

I never really got to the bottom of what Eid is actually about. So while Eid got me longing to be at home in the chill of December, it also got me marvelling at the wonderful good news we celebrate at Christmas. God is not distant—with the birth of Immanuel, God with us, he came to dwell with the people he had made (Matthew 1:23). We don’t need to strive to please God with fasting or prayers or moral behaviour, hopelessly trying to save ourselves—at the birth Jesus, we’re told that the Lord saves us from sin (v 21).

There are probably thousands of Muslims living in this country who, in the hustle and bustle of December, are as bewildered by Christmas as I was by Eid. Will you pray for them? Perhaps you know some of them. Will you explain to them what it’s all about? After all, it’s good news that’s truly worth getting excited over.