The Christmas season is over. If you subscribe strictly to the church calendar, the season might linger on until Saturday. But as a general social rule, the Christmas season is effectively over after New Year’s Day. Now it’s time to get back to life and start the new year (2019: What Could Go Wrong?). So as we turn away from the holidays and back to life, here is a parting reflection.
The glitz and glitter of Christmas sparkles all around us: the lights, multi-colored or all white; the presents, in their stiff, decorative paper; the tinsel on the tree, the glass dishes pressed into Christmas service, all the endless, elaborate decorations. Most people feel impelled to dig beneath the glitter, and hopefully get beyond all the stress and bustle of creating it, with paeans to friends and family, love and peace, even – if so inclined – to Christ in the manger. We know all the homilies about the true meaning of Christmas. We’ve heard them often, probably given them a time or two ourselves.
I have no interest in rehearsing the polemics against consumerism and materialism. I have sympathy for the material pleasures of Christmas – the food, the gifts, the decorations – and while some are certainly too greedy or too single-minded in pursuing them, that abuse does not abolish the use. I would not scrape off the glitter, even if it should cover things of greater worth. The less material pleasures are better yet – the blessings that demand special notice at Christmastime, home and family and love.
Yet all these pleasures, all of these blessings, are fitful. They come and they may go, and even if they don’t, our enjoyment sometimes does. We must face, too, the unevenness of the distribution. Each of these good things – from Christmas gifts to family to peace – is scattered unequally, and you can never puzzle out why some people should be happier than others. But the good news that the angels brought is utterly democratic. It comes to all people, belongs to whoever will not shut it out. What we all need, and none of us deserve, is free to all of us, without prerequisites. Nor is there any fading of this gift, any caprice in this miracle – God’s birth, the silent thunder of the Savior’s coming that shook a blind world.
We all have our share of bad Christmases; some of us, more than our share. But the eternal good of Christmas is that it teaches us to remember. The festivity may be wasted, but the remembrance never is.
Scrooge promised to keep Christmas all the year. All the glitz and glitter goes back into the boxes, and neither our bank accounts nor our digestions could afford to keep up the festivity. And the best part of Christmas can also be packed up and put away. But we have the choice to carry it with us, to remember even after the carols and manger scenes have been retired. The Christmas season is over. But Christmas is always around the next corner, with the news that God has left heaven to set the world right.
