PukhtunWomen

I received a very kind and warm Christmas greeting from a key member of this website earlier today, December 23, 2006. This caused me to think others might be interested in some typical American Christmas experiences and practices.

I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, USA, having been born in Alabama. My father was a government accountant and auditor, my mother was a second grade school teacher while single, resigned under old laws here when she married. Can you believe that during the early 1900s in the deep south USA women had to remain single to be public school teachers? I had one older brother, a veteran of the Korean War, who is deceased due to cigarette smoking and resultant lung cancer.

It was both a Singleton and a Gillis (my Dad's and Mom's family names) family tradition passed down to me as a boy during WW II by my late maternal Gillis Grandmother to write a letter to Santa Claus (St. Nicholas) a few days before Christmas, to then burn the letter in our family home fire place, so that it would be "instantly delivered" to the North Pole mail room for Santa Claus to know what I wanted for Christmas. The trick, of course, was for my Grandmother Gillis to remember my childhood gift wish list long enough to write it down and share it with both my Grandfather and my parents.

During WW II while I was a preschool age little boy we used to telephone in live to Santa Claus's radio program in our local city, and give our wish lists over the air, in addition to our practice of letters up the fireplace chimeny to the North Pole.

As our three daughters were growing up I passed on the letter writing to Santa and burning of these letters immediately in the fire place for North Pole instant delivery to each of our girls, two of whom are twins. The Santa on the live radio programs has died out, I guess due to competition from TV programs.

As our three children are grown and out of college now, they still come home for Christmas. And, if time and cool weather can justify having a log fire in the fireplace, I still ask them to write a Christmas Eve last minute letter to Santa, to "keep up the tradition." However, all gifts by this time are pretty much bought, wrapped, and ready to put under the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, December 24.

On Christmas Eve we go to church at 6 PM, to our Christmas Communion and Bible Lesson Service. This major Christian occasion at our Methodist Church is always overflowing with people, men, women and children. We have to add folding chairs for everyone to have a place to sit, it is always so overflowing and full of people at Christmas Eve service time.

Christmas morning we get up around 9 AM, late for all of us, and then proceed into the living room, and sit around the family Christmas tree, where we open our Christmas gifts to each other, as well as those from other family and friends near and far away. Christmas breakfast is sort of a "brunch" as we have the main Christmas Day meal in mid-afternoon.

Christmas Day dinner (mi-afternoon) is a generations deep tradition in both my wife's Pennsylvania roots family and our Tennessee and Alabama roots family. This year we will have as guests a 90 year old childless widower, whose wife died of brain cancer this past summer. She was a member of our local United Methodist Church. We will also have as guests on Christmas Day a couple our age who are Roman Catholic Christians (in their 60s age wise) whose children and grandchildren live in other states. This couple has already flown around the USA prior to Christmas visiting them family members, sharing gifts, and would otherwise be alone at home here on Christmas Day if not invited to eat dinner with us and then be our guests at a our newer, more modern traditon of taking everyone (on me) to a Christmas night movie at a large local movieplex which shows 18 different movies in 18 theaters all at the same time!

When I was growing up it was fun to shop for and wrap and mail off gifts to other family members who have now all been "promoted to Heaven" due to age and various illnesses: As a boy I had three living aunts, the eldest being 99 when she died; two then living uncles, both with wife and children; as well as at one time during my youth on my late Mother's side of the family I had four Great Aunts, some of whom were born at the end of the US Civil War in the late 1860s! I used to shop and mail gifts to all these folks, their children, my cousins, and their children, too, in some cases. All but one of my formerly numerous first cousins have passed away now.

"Giving" instead of "receiving" is a major emphais for us as Christians at Christmas time. I always give extra money for Christmas to our local church and to various other parachurch organizations like the Salvation Army and the Chuck Colson Prison Ministry (which we helped found in two southern states in years past).

Christmas, despite the materialistic evidence above in this writing, is not about "shopping" but about God sending his son, Jesus, as His "gift of love for our salvation" through faith in Him. Our Christian tradition (Protestant) teaches us that our Heavenly salvation is not achieved by "works, lest any man boast, but by grace, the gift of God in the form of His Son, who was both mortal and divine."

In the spirit of Christmas and of understanding better what both Islam and Christianity have in common, these additional observations at Christmas time may be of cultural and religious interest to you the readers of PakhtunWomen.com. This article was printed in the Dec. 23, 2006 KhyberWatch website on the Internet:

The Meaning of Christmas - also by George Singleton, USA

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While I was a boy growing up in Nashville, Tennesse, USA, I looked up in our family's Encyclopedia Britannica the word "Christmas." It mean's Christ's Mass, as taken from the religious service or rite of the Roman Catholic Church. I/we are not Catholics, but instead are Christians of the Methodist and earlier the Baptist Christian traditions. However, our in common understanding and practice of Christmas is the same among all Christian denominations.

The Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) originally belonged to an early, primitive Christian church or congregation in what is today Saudi Arabia, near what we know today as Mecca. Other members of this early church were Christianized Jews and gentiles or non-Jews.

To digress but connect us all to Christmas and to Christ, Abraham had two sons by two different wives. His first born son was Ishmael, born of his wife Haggar. His thirteen years younger son was Isaac, born of Sarah, Abraham's first wife. God promised in our Holy Bible Book of Genesis a worthy and everlasting future and outcome to both the descendants of Ishmael and Isaac, who were in fact half brothers, in common father being Abrham, but different mothers, Haggar and Sarah.

We was Christians trace our religious heritage down to Christ from the line of Isaac, whereas you trace your religious heritage down from the line of Ishmael. We all recognize the same God who we all were created by, and are the children of the same God, who we as Christians recognize in three persons: God the Father, God the Son (Jesus) and God the Holy Ghost (the Spirit of God). The Trinity is a difficult concept for some to understand.

Today, and ever since Jesus death, burial, and ressurection, Jesus, who was both man and divine, we celebrate Christmas as our best guess as to the date of the birth of Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, a holy birth. Your Holy Book, the Quaran, has the Book of Mary in it, which gives your version of who Mary was in relationship to Jesus, her son.

My Christmas story point is: Jesus was not recognized by many Jews, even though Jesus himself was a Jew, then and today, because he did not come down to earth as a "warrior king" whom the Jews of old wished for to cast off the yoke of Roman oppression. Instead, Jesus came to teach us to love one another, to worship our in common father, God, and to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Jesus also completed the promise of life eternal with the Father, God, in Heaven, who our earthly days end. Jesus taught us separation of church and state saying: "Render unto God that which is God's and unto Caesar that which is Caesar's." This means to pay your tithe to God to support His church and to pay your civil taxes to Caesar who at that time was the form of civil goverment you were served by and were under.

Similiarly, in today's religious world, there are still those among the Jews who "wish for a warrior coming of the Son of God" and still do not realize or recongize who Jesus was and is. We Christians believe in the Second Coming of Jesus, which will involve the judging of the quick (the living) and the dead (those who have gone before us). And the final end of Satan's existance and actions in our world of today.

Understand as a side comment that Jews in Jesus day were of the Saducee and Pharasee sects. One group believed in life eternal or the after life but one group did not believe in life eternal nor an after life. Jesus was of the Jewish sect which did belive in life eternal or an after life.

While your Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) studied who Jesus was as a member, originally, of an early, primitive Christian Church in what is today Saudi Arabia, he then had his own vision of God and God's relationship of Jesus to and of God. Much of this I don't pretend to fully know or understand. However, I do understand that Muhammed did believe that Jesus would "come again" in a second coming, and would sit on the right hand of God to "judge the quick and the dead" as we likewise believe.

Muhammed (pbuh) did not, at any time, ever ask his students and followers to worship him, as this would be blasphemy. He did not represent himself as divine, ever. Muhammed was a good man, a studied and learned man, and one who loved God with all his heart, mind, and spirit in our understanding of him.

Understanding the different paths we as Christians vs. you all as Muslims follow to this day to the same, in common God, all of us being the incommon descendants of our religious forefather, Abraham, we celebrate the event and advent of Christmas joyously to recognize to us as Christians that Jesus came and brought salvation through faith in Him as the son of God, that we may find life eternal with the Father, God, in Heaven, when our trials and tribulations are over and we expire on this tired old earth.

We as Christians view today's Jews as our fellow children of God brothers and sisters. We view our Muslim brothers and sisters as our fellow children of God brothers and sisters. We respect you all and know that your prayers are heard by God, just as our prayers are heard by the same God.

So it is with the spirit of assurance and hope of the life eternal for those who believe in God, through his son Jesus Christ, that we wish all mankind, of all faith systems, a very Merry Christmas during this holy season.

Bless you all and we trust you likewise bless us all, too.

George L. Singleton, Colonel, USAF, Ret.
USAF Air Base at Peshawar Liaison Officer with the US Embassy then in Karachi, 1963-1965, when I was a young Air Force Lieutenant
USA