Does it feel weird to you that Christmas falls on a Wednesday this year? When holidays fall in the middle of the week for a weekly newspaper, it is always a quandary. Do we print a day early, or a day late?
The Saratoga Sun is printed by the Rawlins Daily Times and we have been working on the question since September.
The Saratoga Sun has staff who need to travel out-of-town to see family, or spend Christmas alone. It takes planning and communication to plan to print the paper on another day.
If we printed on Christmas Eve, then several employees would be working late into the night.
If we came out on Thursday, we would still have to print on Christmas Eve.
This year we opted to print on Monday and deliver the paper on Tuesday. This allows our employees to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas with their families.
We will be doing the same next week as well.
The downfall - we are working on Sunday to get the paper ready for our readers. The sacrifice is worth it.
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There has been a lot of comments on Facebook about people being offended by the words Merry Christmas.
For Christians, it is a time of celebration of the birth of our Lord and Savior. It is a celebration of our beliefs.
For any other religion, it is a celebration of their belief as well and it is something that should be respected.
When I lived in Des Moines, I worked for a Jewish family that owned a seed bag factory. I was one of their bookkeepers. They did not celebrate Christmas, but they allowed those of us who did to put up a tree, gave us Christmas off and also paid us Christmas bonuses.
When I was working in Rawlins, my boss was Jewish, yet she respected my beliefs, as I respected hers. We exchanged gifts and talked about the different ways we celebrate our respective holidays.
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I think that for all of us, whether we are Christian, Jewish, Muslim or whatever, that this time of year should be a time for reflection of peace and tranquility.
It is a time we should be forgiving instead of fighting. It should be a time when we tell our family we love them, even though we may not love the things they do.
Whether we worship in a church, the pasture, at home, in a synagogue or a mosque, we should remember to respect one another.
If we are Christian, then we believe God made all of us, regardless of who or what they worship and we should be accepting of them. So what if they don’t have the same belief as you or me? That shouldn’t matter if you truly follow the Golden Rule.
In other countries and in the Bible, people were stoned for their beliefs. Words are stones when we criticize someone else for their beliefs.
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The comment I saw Monday morning said it best:
“I don’t understand what the big deal is … If you are Jewish, tell me ‘Happy Hanukkah’, if you are Christian, tell me ‘Merry Christmas’. If you are African American, tell me ‘Joyous Kwanzaa’. If you don’t prefer those, tell me ‘Happy Holidays’. I will not be offended. I will be thankful that you took the time to say something nice to me.”
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