Which Christmas Will We Keep?
So This is Christmas. The chill in the air, the gray of the sky, the sun’s daily retreat from the encroaching darkness, remind us of the holiday’s approach. But we knew that long before the weather or calendar confirmed those feelings. Since the end of October we’ve been reminded that we have only _____ days left to buy up what the stores and Amazon have chosen for us to give our loved ones this year. And the colorful lights, the decorated trees and wreaths adorning our homes and businesses have made it unmistakably clear. For me, Christmas is carried on the wings of carols played nonstop on our ubiquitous “i” companions. While Thanksgiving offered us respite to reunite with our families over turkey and football, Christmas has remained our destination and preoccupation.
But which Christmas will command and demand so much of our time and energy this year? Which Christmas? There is more than one you know. I’m not referring to those different holy days observed across Christendom. Nor am I alluding to those three spectral visitors who transformed that Victorian humbug on a spooky London night. This year I am thinking about which of the three Christmases that annually vie for my attention will stake the largest and most compelling claim on my heart, my hopes, and my pocketbook. Three? Yes, three. While they intersect, overlap and depend on each other, they nonetheless have their own unique seasons, rituals and symbols, their distinctive accouterments and their uniquely endearing values. Let me tell you about them.
“Oh look, yet another Christmas TV special! How touching to have the meaning of Christmas brought to us by cola, fast food, and beer....Who'd have ever guessed that product consumption, popular entertainment, and spirituality would mix so harmoniously? ” ― Bill Watterson, The Essential Calvin and Hobbes
The first Christmas we celebrate each year is also the longest and most irresistible, holding us in its spell for 1/6 of the year: the American Christmas. It begins the moment Halloween costumes are stashed in the attic, carries us through a two-month flurry of decorating, shopping, partying, overeating and drinking, and ends in the anti-climactic flourish of torn wrapping paper strewn over our floors. Christmas American-style is a fusion of traditional, popular, and even patriotic sounds and images that fill our broadcast airtime and online postings. Overtly it intends to “get us in the holiday spirit”, which in translation means drawing us into that annual frenzy of overindulgence that serves as prelude to one very special evening and morning of generosity and joy.
Christmas in America usually lifts our spirits by reminding us of the blessings of friends and family. And by filling our dance card with so many dinners, parties, school programs, visits and trips, it invariably brings our stress to such a crescendo that only the serenity of a candlelit Silent Night can calm us—if only for a fleeting moment. And then there’s the scenery. We Americans must really enjoy the dazzle of lighted houses and the competitive spirit of outdoing our neighbors. White or colorful orbs silhouetting our rooftops or dripping in ice-cycle illumination, sidewalks demarked like runways, and front yards packed with LED images of our favorite saints and heroes of the American Christmas pantheon--you don’t have to go far in your neighborhood to take in the spectacle. Are we ever surprised when we behold the baby Jesus, Santa Claus with his entourage of elves and reindeer, menorahs, Kwanza candles, the Grinch, Frosty, and a host of Disney celebrities all standing in harmonious proximity? If the ways we decorate our homes reveal something about those who dwell therein, then we must be unabashedly spiritual folks, even if we’re not always religious. The American Christmas bears witness to our delight in celebrating the sacred in even the most secular stories and symbols, many of which now surpass and eclipse the more traditional expressions of Christian faith.
It seems to me that beneath the excesses and over-the-top commercialism of the American Christmas lay our abiding optimism in the goodness of people and the righteousness of our way of life. Where else is the free expression of individual tastes and beliefs so permitted, promoted and protected? Where else is gift-giving so tied to our success and happiness? Where else was a once-austere Christian cleric recast into the portly, geriatric but kindly personification of no-child-left behind kindness and compassion? Yes, Virginia, Santa Claus, the patron saint of America’s Christmas, is alive and well. And to the extent that he is both omniscient (“he sees you when your sleeping, he knows…”) and omnibenevolent, Santa may be the most beloved and believable personification of God in America today.
The American Christmas is hard to ignore or resist. We may not always like it, and we may see through many of its excesses. Yet it is part of who we are, and we, in turn, are part of its continuing evolution. If you’re like me you find much of it a bit contrived, shallow and insincere. Yet I will keep it, even though it doesn’t stir my longing nor capture my heart nearly so much as the second Christmas I hope to celebrate this year.
“The world has grown weary through the years, but at Christmas, it is young.” — Phillips Brooks
The album cover says it all for me: a sleeping child, nestled in the loving embrace of a parent who has played his part in making Christmas such a special time of innocence, trust and hope. My father played this album every year in our home, its orchestrations now my password to a time and place long gone but never to be forgotten. Hearing it each year takes me to a very brief moment in time, when as a young boy I was transfixed by the sights, the sounds and the smells that my mother and father so lovingly and intentionally created for my sister and me. The ritual of choosing and decorating the tree; the voices of carolers strolling through the neighborhood; the nightly couch-time gleefully watching Christmas specials; the aromatic smell of toll-house cookies in the over; the magic of awakening early, rousing our parents and opening the presents so colorfully wrapped under the tree—this is the Christmas that moistens my eyes and stirs my heart; the Christmas which still evokes my whispered prayers of thanks for having been so lucky, and so blessed
I know that the Christmas of my childhood was probably never as wonderful as I have remembered it. Yet it so powerfully touched my young heart with joy and love that I have tried to keep this Christmas alive, blending its traditions with those precious to my wife’s childhood, in creating some semblance of what we enjoyed for our children and grandchildren. In those days Christmas didn’t begin until Santa came riding in as the capstone of Macy’s Thanksgiving processional. My parents even waited until Christmas Eve, after my sister and I were snuggled in our beds, to add the bubbly lights, glass ornaments, and tinsel to our small, tabletop tree. There is no doubt that I miss the sheltered and child-centered “G” rated universe of those 1950s Christmases, and wonder if today’s children sense any of the same assurance and comfort that many of us knew—and recall—from these simpler, less complicated times of our youth.
No matter how old we get, no matter how many years and miles place impassable distances between us and our yesterdays, the Christmas of childhood continues to beckon us home. Yet as precious are these memories, we cannot ignore the fact that it is we who keep rewriting them, selectively editing out what we don’t want to recall. And in the process we create a kind of Currier and Ives still life of that childhood Christmas that reveals more about us now than it does about a past we continue to embellish to meet our spiritual needs and yearnings of the present. What remains is a beautiful place we may yet visit, if only for a season, but a place, nonetheless, where we can no longer live.
Herod, the king in his raging, chargèd he hath this day
His men of might in his own sight, All young children to slay.
—The Coventry Caro, 16th Century English
The third Christmas we celebrate is much more difficult to pin down, even though for most of us it is quite familiar. It doesn’t have a season measured in months or even weeks, beginning at midnight’s stroke on the 25th day of the 12th month before yielding to Epiphany, 13 days later, on January 6. The third Christmas is the one we hear proclaimed from church pulpits, sometimes in comforting Elizabethan verse, while we sit shoulder to shoulder in seasonally lit sanctuaries on Christmas Eve. Like the shepherds and magi who meet us there each year, we come seeking tidings of comfort and joy, touched by the solemnity of this place where the third Christmas, the biblical Christmas, abides.
Of all the Christmases I’ve mentioned, this one is the most disconcerting, for it offers both the promise of our greatest hopes and the sad reminder of our most enduring fears. Heard with childlike ears, the biblical stories are easy to digest and repeat. On that first noel, angels were heard on high upon the midnight clear, drawing the attention of shepherds quaking at the sight, bidding them to come and adore the babe cradled by his mother not far away in a manger near the little town of Bethlehem. What child is this they still inquire, while we, at our two-millennial remove, nod and smile. This story we hear each year and teach to our children holds forth the promise of Emmanuel, the assurance that God is, in fact, with us, that the light shines in the darkness, strengthening us to endure its worst terrors.
Yet the biblical narratives that lay behind those beloved hymns and touching nativity scenes portray a much harsher, darker reality than the festivity and glee we expect at Christmas. In one we encounter a dying, paranoid king; the slaughter of two-year olds who threatened his dynastic ambitions; and a narrow escape to the safety of a foreign land. The other takes us to a cave outside of a hillside town where we look in on a baby born to parents driven there by imperial edict, the very one that planted the seeds of revolt that Rome crushed six decades later. Neither Matthew nor Luke is meant for a child’s bedtime ears or simplistic holiday consumption. There are no moonlit snowy landscapes, no elfin visitors bearing toys, no festive parties or family reunions. It is not for the faint of heart nor does it evoke the kind of frivolity and escapism that we may prefer in our holiday entertainments.
The third Christmas, the biblical Christmas, is not as glamorous or loud as the American Christmas. Nor is it as warm and fuzzy as the Christmas of my childhood. But it is the Christmas that beckons Christians to reflect on what it yet means, what its message may be saying in our time, our place, and our living. I wonder how many really want to, or can, keep this third Christmas, the biblical version, now or ever. For it reminds us that life is too often unfair and cruel, that injustice sometimes has the last word, and that the powerful continue to trample the weak, just as they did when the Christ-child was born. It may be precisely in that demoralizing realization that the light of this unexpected birth touches us most deeply. And it is in that moment, for those with eyes to see, that the light of truth, the light of love, may be most discernible. Could it be that this third Christmas touches the heart and quickens the mind more than the others, whose nostalgic sentimentality and self-gratifying indulgences provide everything we may want—but little that we actually need.
Which Christmas will you, will I, keep this year? Which one will most capture and engage us over the next several weeks? Maybe all of them, maybe just one. But whichever one becomes your Christmas, may it prove to be as meaningful to you as it is merry.
