A Christmas Contemplation

 I love Christmas.

I love the family time and the food and the ugly sweater parties. I love the snow (when we have it) and the hot cocoa and our quirky Christmas tree with its motley assortment of ornaments. This season brings so many good things along with it.

This year, though, it’s been a little harder to get into the “Christmas spirit.” We haven’t had much snow, and what with the semester flying by so fast, it seems like Christmas has been hiding behind the giant Santa inflatable in my neighbor’s yard for the last month and a half, and just now decided to jump out at us. I’ve thought about this apparent dryness in the season a lot, pondering what could possibly be lacking.

Maybe I don’t own enough Christmas socks.

Maybe we need to bake more delicious and festive treats.

Maybe I should make it a point to play only Christmas music from this point on.

But really, the more I ponder that question, the more I get to feeling that depending on all of those things to get us into the Christmas spirit is what causes us to miss the whole point of all of it.

By now, most of us are mature enough to readily agree that no, Christmas is not about getting presents. Christmas is not about being miserly and shouting “Bah! Humbug.” against the wind. What it’s really about, children, is giving, we say. Christmas is about family. It’s about being charitable and finding joy in what we have and “believing in magic.”

Wrong.

Christmas is not about any of those things. Those things, while all are good and generally admirable things, are not, and should never be, at the center of our focus. When that happens, we get trapped in this little snow globe of expectations about what Christmas should feel like, and we start forcing ourselves to do more and be more, wondering why we still can’t quite achieve the feeling of Christmas about which we have become so nostalgic. All this striving distracts us from the truth we don’t know we’re looking for. The truth that, despite all the hype, Christmas is about something far more powerful, far more extreme and far more world-shaking than our little watered-down, Santa-is-coming-to-town, romanticized-Nativity-scene version.

And it’s so easy to agree with that statement, isn’t it?

“Well, of course Jesus is the reason for the season,” we cry, shaking our fists at the tyranny of society’s materialism, while blatantly ignoring the fact that that phrase is one of the biggest cop-outs in the history of the universe. It’s a cop-out because it allows us to feel justified and righteous, without getting so deep as to become uncomfortable. Then we can go back to our fruitless search for meaning through festivity.

If you celebrate Christmas (and I hope you do, because it’s pretty much the best thing ever), my prayer for you and for all of us this year is that we can finally begin to deeply comprehend the meaning of the Christmas story-the story of a God so radical, so extreme, that He did the most miraculous thing the world has ever seen. The story of a king becoming the lowest of the low, all because He loved a few humble peasants enough to endure any and all suffering to save them.

The Creator of the universe calls us to let His story, the Christmas story, become our own. Because He loves his creation, and refuses to give up on those He loves. And that’s the truth.

Merry Christmas.