This is why in Orthodoxy Easter is the most important feast. We live then fully the sadness and the joy — the Passion, the Death, the Glory and the Resurrection — , having only a simple foretaste of all of them in Christmas.
In the West, on the contrary, because hope returned horribly to this passing life, death lost its sacred dimensions and is just rejected, we live as if there was no death, and Resurrection is not important anymore, so that the divine birth has become a symbol of welfare (celebrated sometimes even by non-Christians!), a kind of carnival, the center of which is not even in the picturesque manger but in a ho-ho-ho fatso, sledges, pets and bells…
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