Sunday evening was incredible!  Spasenie, an acoustic band from Belarus shared their music, hearts and souls with us last night.  Folks from Latvia, Ukraine, Russia and Belarus came together with Americans to sing and worship God.  I was immediately taken by their charm.  These guys have been touring the U.S. for the past 3 months in a 35 ft RV.  This was their last night.  They had averaged 2-4 performances a week and sometimes 3 on Sundays.

Their sound was somewhere between smooth jazz and rock to folk.  In fact they closed their concert with a series of Jewish folk-songs from their area Belarus, Brest.  It’s located close to the Polish boarder.  Several of the band members (who spoke English) took to easy conversation with a couple of teens – curious of their instruments.

Igor, the lead singer and saxophone player stopped and shared what Christmas meant to him.  He shared with us his experience growing up in socialist/communist Belarus and how for many years Christmas was officially banned.  It was replaced with a New Year’s celebration.  I stopped and thought about life in a world where Christmas is banned.  No decorated trees, no shopping mall Santa, no mangers on the front lawns, no Christmas program for adults or children.  This is hard for this white bread suburban raised guy to wrap his brain around.  It’s one thing to read about socialism/communism or watch it on the History Channel and another thing to hear some-one’s first hand account of their first Christmas – because all prior ones were outlawed.  It was not Igor’s intention to make a big political statement – he simply restated a familiar adage -”keep Christ in Christmas.”  What he sees in America is the rank commercialization and dissolving of the true meaning of Christmas.  He used his experience and observation to introduce a song that simply admonished us to “keep Christ in Christmas.” 

What would I do or how would I feel, if tomorrow our government decreed, (with the emphatic command of Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi) “No Christmas for you!”