To all our readers, thank you for your continued support. The Times of Zambia team is wishing you a Merry Christmas and a happy new year.
We are sincerely taking this time to wish you a festive season filled with joy and happiness.
However, we feel such a celebration calls for responsibility since if mishandled, it can lead to misery.
As a newspaper, we beg that we may bond together in love and caring since we are not only one family but also united in our belief of Jesus Christ being our saviour.
The battle of life is difficult and peace hard to find, but each one of us has the ability to take that moment to feel the joy of peace and love in our hearts.
We must thus look forward to a future filled with prayers for our nation and leader President Edgar Lungu instead of becoming agents of doom who want to divide this country along tribal lines.
Since Zambia is a Christian nation, we are calling on citizens to celebrate Christmas the Christian way since this event  is  a religious festival hinged on the virgin birth of Jesus.
Forget the much-advanced shallow argument of the day not being the actual date when Christ was born since the mere observation of the date is an act of worship for people who purport to be Christians.
Though Christmas traditions vary from country to country apart from similarities like lighting of Christmas trees, creation of Nativity scenes depicting the birth of Jesus Christ and playing of Christmas carols, for Zambia which is a Christian nation, citizens should go an extra mile to ensure the event is mainly hinged on prayers.
We say this knowing that Christmas has been largely commercialised and secularised defeating the whole purpose of the date being symbolically the birth of Christ.
Many people invested heavily in decorating, baking, shopping and truly getting into the Christmas spirit with several radio stations playing a stream of Christmas songs at the beginning of the month.
For business people, Christmas is the period they sell their products to customers who shop for the event.
Almost everybody invests a great amount of time and energy into preparing for the main event that only lasts one day.
If you look at it in black and white it almost appears silly, though it shouldn’t be that way.
Outside the religious realm though a positive feature, the festive period is the time when traditions and memories are made since families from afar come in for a visit and a giving spirit is amongst everyone.
We feel we can go a step further by exhibiting our Christian side by going to church with our families and loved ones to worship God who has made it possible for us to celebrate this year’s Christmas.
For many years now, some Zambians have used this important day to visit pubs, visit girlfriends or drink themselves to prison or the mortuary which shouldn’t be the case.
Once more happy Christmas!