I have recently been concerned about what I should post in my blog. Being a seminarian, one may expect that I would have something about Christmas. For good reason, I feel obliged to blog about Christmas.
Yet, the more and more I think about it, the more I realize that I have very little to say about Christmas. It is a big deal of course. When you honestly sit down and think about God taking on human form, it can give you chills. But, when I think of Christmas, I tend to imagine the smell of fresh gingerbread, lights, and presents, and in some sense, that is Christmas.
The celebration of Christ’s birth, for me at least, has been divorced from the idea of ‘Christmas’. I think that the distinction between these two ideas is prevalent in our culture as well. Think of a Christmas movie. Most movies have the main character getting mixed up about what’s important in life. In the end, they come to a realization of what the spirit of Christmas is all about: Christmas is about loving other people. It is about family, and friends, and good cheer.
Christmas is not about family, friends, or good cheer. Christmas is about Christ. That is it. Everything else is ‘Christmasy’ only in so far as it stems from and points back to Christ.
It takes a conscious effort in order to remember that all of this is because of our loving Father sending his Son to us. I don’t really have much to say about Christmas because this fact is so hard for me to stamp into my heart. At the end of Dr. Seuss’s book How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Grinch realizes that Christmas “doesn’t come from a store… maybe Christmas means a little bit more”. Notice that no mention of Christ is made. The Grinch doesn’t get baptized. Perhaps this is because the Who’s could not find any water that wasn’t frozen into their snowflake.
The reader is left with the idea that Christmas means something else
without the explanation of what exactly that might be.
And through all the Who’s and hububaloo, I realize that reader is me.
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