It’s that time of year again: a time for lights, garlands, trees, menorahs, peppermint mochas, exhausted Amazon workers, and iconoclasm.

We live in an age of conflict. It’s no secret. We have the defenders of the old ways, whom we call conservatives. And we have the visionaries of a new tomorrow, whom we call progressives. They tussle each other on the internet, on Senate floors, in popular media, and occasionally even in the streets. One group looks to the past with longing. The other would like to see much of it burned down. It’s easy to be sympathetic, and also to be angry, with both sides.

When it comes to the holidays, I’m a sentimentalist. Maybe that means I’m a conservative, too. Growing up debt-poor from my mother’s health, our family always cherished Christmas. It was, as the imagery suggests, a season of light in the darkness. We were Christians (as I still am), and the religious connotations were extremely significant. It was not until adulthood that I learned some Christians, of a particular stripe, avoided Christmas like the plague—considering it a mixture of paganism, Catholicism (to them, a bad thing), and greed.

I also knew, as a child, that not everyone celebrated Christmas. But as far as I was aware, growing up in Idaho in the 1980s, everyone either celebrated Christmas or Hanukkah. So we were all united in celebration, gift-giving, and lights.

Of course, as we grow up, we learn how life really works. Much of our emphasis on gifts, it turns out, really is just the feeding of greed. Late evenings shopping, and nice dinners out, might mean jobs for our neighbors—but they also mean long and tiring evenings for those same neighbors, often poorly paid and away from their own homes serving us. All the shopping and giving create social expectations and the pressure to go into debt. And the packaging and cross-country shipping doesn’t help the environment, either.

So maybe we should burn it all down. Maybe we should jettison the whole idea of Christmas. Or maybe we should make it so generic, and pack it with so much non-traditional imagery, that it really doesn’t mean anything to anyone anymore. When even Santa Claus has become a symbol, in the minds of many, of white evangelical oppression, maybe the whole season really is a loss.

Maybe. But maybe we don’t have to let go of Christmas. Maybe I don’t have to let go of my sentimentality, either.

In the Christian tradition, the good things in life are looked at as both gifts and temptations. They are gifts if they are used with gratitude, and are allowed to point beyond themselves to the source of good: God himself. They are temptations when treated as an end in themselves, or used as a means of harm.

If my love of Christmas causes me to resent my neighbor and her iconoclasm, then I’m misusing Christmas. I’m treating it as an end in itself, and am even weaponizing it for my little corner of the culture war. But if I treat it as what it is (for me as a Christian, at least)—a symbol of light entering darkness, of God offering friendship to humanity through Jesus—then Christmas (and all its warm, fuzzy feelings) can point beyond itself to something more.

It can point me to love and generosity. It can point me beyond darkness to light, and fill me with a desire for reconciliation and peace. The conservative in me can look back on the Christmases of yesteryear with joy and with sentiment, even as I join my progressive neighbor in looking forward to a better tomorrow.

Mike Ivaska is the pastor of Vashon Island Community Church.