CHARISMA: When did you come up with the idea to do a Christmas movie and tackle this subject?
KIRK CAMERON: About a year ago. I love Christmas and everything about it. But every year, more and more, I find there are people inside and outside the church who want to put a big wet blanket on all of it. You have people outside the church, atheists and others, who say, “Look, that’s not really what Christmas is all about. It’s a winter solstice holiday. You guys just stole a pagan tradition. And by the way, if you want to celebrate your Nativity and your manger, you can do that inside your own house, but keep your voices down. Don’t celebrate it loudly, and don’t let it spill out into the public square. You just keep it private.”
Then you have this other group inside the church telling us, “Hey, wait a minute—as Christians, we shouldn’t have Christmas trees because pagans have Christmas trees. And we really shouldn’t be spending money on presents, because that’s just materialism, isn’t it? Think of all the kids we could be feeding in Africa and the wells we could be digging, and this is all really just wasteful. Also, Wikipedia says Jesus probably wasn’t born on Dec. 25, so that’s not even His birthday. So the whole Christmas thing ought to be celebrated during the Feast of Tabernacles according to the Jewish calendar.”
Everybody seems to have a problem with Christmas except the retail stores, but even they don’t want to call it Christmas because of all the political correctness. You have to say “Season’s Greetings” or “Happy Holidays.” Nobody wants to say “Merry Christmas.” Wait a minute—this is the most important event in the history of the world. God became a man and landed on planet Earth. This ought to be the greatest time of celebration for Christians and non-Christians because it’s changed everything. It changed church, family, education, science, government, entertainment—everything. There’s no better and bigger celebration than Christmas. So I wanted to make a movie about putting Christ back into Christmas.
CHARISMA: The website for your movie was hacked, right? What happened?
CAMERON: It was hacked, absolutely, but they have it back up and running now. It was a fairly sophisticated group of hackers. It really just proves the point of the movie —that there really is a war on Christmas. Some people want to say that Christians are just whining and complaining and making up the whole thing. I think this handily proves the point that there is an attack on Christmas. Why else would you go after a website like this about the most joyful, wonderful day of the year? It’s interesting and exciting times that we live in these days, and now is the time for the church to wake up and remember who we are and Whose we are and to get this message of the gospel out to the ends of the Earth, because the world desperately needs to know the love of Jesus.
CHARISMA: How should Christians who encounter secular greetings during the holiday season respond?
CAMERON: As you see in the movie, the best way to put Christ back into Christmas is not to whine and complain about those who hate it but to throw a bigger Christmas party at your house. Lean into the celebration, and don’t keep it private. Let it spill out to your front yard and down your street. Invite the whole neighborhood, and tell them about this story of this King and His kingdom—and tell them they have an important part in it. That’s how you put Christ back into Christmas. And stop listening to the pagans. You can safely dismiss all those arguments, because pagans don’t own anything. God owns all the trees in the world. God owns all the solar eclipses, the lunar eclipses; He owns the summer, the winter, the spring and the fall. He owns the winter solstice. He owns everything. Just because some pagans came along and started to think the evergreen tree was pretty cool, does that mean we shouldn’t put trees in our houses when God put trees inside of His tabernacle and temple and loaded them with fruit and lights? No.
Charisma Media Staff 
James Lasher 
