Linda and I spent the first couple of days of December 2022 in Frankenmuth, Michigan. It’s a quaint town known for its Bavarian heritage and the largest Christmas store in the world. BRONNER’S CHRISTmas WONDERLAND is the size of several mega-Walmart stores put together. Its parking lots can accommodate 1,470 cars, motorcoaches, and RVs. Passengers can be dropped off under large, covered drive-through entryways. The Season’s Eatings Snack Area offers soups, sandwiches, treats, and Christmas cookies year round.

Bronner’s dreamland offers “splendid indoor and outdoor photo opportunities.” The entire complex is surrounded by Christmas scenes. Christmas lane “shimmers each night from dusk to midnight with over 100,000 sparkling lights.” Bronner’s motto is “Making CHRISTMAS memories every day!” The World’s Largest Christmas Store is open 361 days a year, closed only on New Year’s Day, Easter, Thanksgiving, and December 25.

Inside Bronner’s is more Christmas merchandise than we had ever seen. Lights, banners, ribbons, Christmas trees, wreaths, ornaments, nativities, Santa Clauses, reindeer, sleighs, elves, carolers, stockings, hats, toys, and almost everything else you can imagine related to Christmas. The founders, Wally Bronner (1927-2008), and his wife, Irene, built the business on the idea of “celebrating the joy of Jesus’ birth every day.”

Needless to say, Linda and I were overwhelmed. We were overwhelmed, not by the story of the birth of Jesus, but by the commercialism. The vast complex is a far cry from a simple stable in Bethlehem. As I state in the Introduction to "Spelunking Scripture: Christmas":

“Christmas is a big deal—in our culture, in our families, and in our churches. The Christmas season is the most popular holiday of the year. Almost everyone knows about the baby in the manger, except that in some circles, Santa Claus is more popular than Jesus.”

The Bronner family has made Christmas a big deal in Frankenmuth, Michigan. Not just the CHRISTmas WONDERLAND, but the streets of the town are lined with lights and decorations. The huge Christmas tree next to the Frankenmuth Visitors Center plays Christmas music every night. Most of the stores and restaurants and other businesses are festooned with Christmas decorations.

The result is a product that draws visitors/customers from all over. At our motel we met a couple from Canada who had driven over six hours to get to Frankenmuth. No doubt, other visitors had come from even further. We had. Frankenmuth is more than 620 miles from Bowie, Maryland, where we live.

Almost everyone in our culture knows about Christmas, but do we know what Christmas really means? That’s the purpose of "Spelunking Scripture: Christmas," to get beneath the surface level of Christmas to seek to explore it’s deeper meaning for our lives.