“I loathe Christmas,” begins the first essay in William Cole’s collection Bah, Humbug! Grumping through the Season. The book’s indictment is the expected one: Christmas is expensive, sentimental, artificial, and materialistic. It brings together noisome relations and noisy children, the latter being the focus of much of the authors’ bile. Christmas is for the children, they complained. But they were wrong. Christmas is for adults—at least it should be, for adults need Christmas much more than children do.
The curmudgeons have a bit of a point. Secular Christmas invades Advent’s quiet, plopping tacky inflatables on the barely raked lawn and ironic ornaments on the tree. It blares versions of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” not sung by the great German tenor Jonas Kaufmann. And it cultivates insatiable desires for more presents, more candy, more cookies. The night before Christmas is frantic and exhausting for parents; the next morning easily becomes a laboratory of Girardian mimetic desire.
The road to Christmas is paved with good intentions. Aloise Buckley Heath, writing in her brother’s National Review, describes how one year she tried to implement the Austrian custom of the Christkindl, in which members of a family choose each other for performing secret acts of kindness during Advent. With each day’s act, a child adds some straw to a manger where the Christ child—the Christkindl—will sleep on Christmas Eve. As she writes, it didn’t turn out as badly as it could have:
After a few days of such good turns as reporting that a Christkindl hadn’t done his arithmetic because he was going to copy Georgie’s before school tomorrow (and he just can’t learn anything that way, can he, Mother?), or throwing a Christkindl’s cherished leather jacket into the washing machine (because it was so absolutely filthy he could have got germs from it, Mother), or taking the batteries out of a Christkindl’s flashlight because she reads under the covers after bedtime (and that’s why practically everybody practically constantly goes blind, isn’t it, Mother?), everybody was getting pretty tense. (Well, all right: bloody.) And in our family, when everybody is these, somebody minds it enough to stop it. I don’t know which of them found the solution to our Christkindl problem; all I know is every Sunday now, they each buy nine penny lollipops, and every night they slip a lollipop under their Christkindl’s pillow. Well, I know that doesn’t sound so terribly spiritual, but it’s better than what they used to do. What they used to do was steal each other’s lollipops.
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The Christkindl is but one of the many Christmas traditions by which we parents try to teach the meaning of the feast. And despite all the things to bemoan in preparing for Christmas, it can work, even for the poor Heaths. My mother grew up with the Christkindl every year, and at my grandparents’ sixtieth anniversary, her sisters spoke about how it taught them to practice the deep generosity at the heart of their parents’ marriage.
In schools and summer camps and homes, we protect our children like plants in greenhouses and prepare them for entering the “real world.” Even when imperfect, our Christmas traditions are a more intense form of these artificial worlds we construct for them. At Christmas, the house slowly fills with the smell of cookies and evergreen. The windowsills burst with cards from loved ones. The mantlepiece gets its boughs and candles. The crèche fills with figures—all but the baby Jesus, who will come on Christmas morning. For me, the last preparations for Christmas begin with a boy soprano in King’s College, Cambridge singing the opening verse of “Once in Royal David’s City.” For my mother, the season of Advent came to a close when her father would wake the children for midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, carrying a lantern room to room and singing an old Austrian carol, “Shepherds, Up!” The carol was only sung once a year, and only in German.
It takes a lot to make that Christmas world, and we think we do it mainly to teach the children. But if we understand Christmas correctly, we see that we need the lessons more than they do. I once visited a dear friend in her monastery, and during my time there, I felt like a branch taken from the outer edge of the fire and thrust into the hottest part in its center. Christmas can be like that, too. Its beautiful artifice takes us out of the adult world’s anxieties and woes, its sorrows and pains, and brings us into the deepest truth at the heart of life. It brings us out of the “real world,” into the world that is more real.
A principle of Thomistic thought holds that whatever is received, is received according to the mode of the receiver. When a four-year-old asks why the soldiers put nails in Jesus’s hands, I can give a thoughtful explanation of sin and our participation in evil, but he will be thinking about why they didn’t run him over with a monster truck. God knows he needs to proclaim the truth so that we can receive it, and Christmas is perhaps the moment when we see this most. God is a communion of self-giving love. Meister Eckhart describes creation as an ebullitio, a boiling or bubbling over of this love, this goodness diffusive of itself, into the world. To save that world, now wounded by sin and pride, God came according to a mode by which we could begin to receive the reality of his love, a mode that would bear the shape of the Trinity itself.
Christmas teaches us this great mystery: the truth of Trinitarian love is so beautiful and heart-breaking that it could only be communicated in the form of a child. Being a father has driven home the reality of children in a new way. When my wife was expecting our first son, a friend told me: “Being married is joyful; having children is like mainlining joy.” I have found this to be true. Yes, having children is exhausting and self-consuming and all the rest, but my little son is a well of bottomless joy and wonder, right within reach. The sound of his voice and the touch of his hand are some of life’s sweetest delights. Léon Bloy writes that suffering brings into existence new places in the human heart, but so does joy. God came to us as a baby to show us that joy is more real than sorrow, that our deepest joys now are but a taste of his inner life.
Christmas is a season of gratuitous beauty, both in the sense of being excessive and being a gift of grace. When celebrated rightly, all the effort and cost become an extravagant gift, a sign of the lavish generosity and glory of God. Christmas is the feast when that glory is revealed as humble and self-emptying, when God condescends to become a beauty we can receive. “You can never stop looking at your baby,” my mother told me, and she was right. This is not because a baby is brilliantly truthful or morally good, but because he is beautiful in a way that nothing else is.
In her recent St. Margaret of Scotland Lecture at St. Andrew’s, theologian Jennifer Newsome Martin reflects on what our experience of beauty teaches us about the truth of God—in this case, the beauty of a garden of sunflowers she had planted last spring:
And I could not stop looking at them. I never grew tired of looking at them. . . . I regarded the sunflowers in a mode of absolute gratuity, contemplating without expectation those magnificent, endlessly fascinating heliotropes that followed the sun all day with their attentive, cheerful faces turned toward the corollary giftedness of its rays. . . .
To look at them—and I know saying this probably approaches cliché—made my heart soar. I could actually feel it in my chest. But it also, in a very real way, made my heart sore. The homonymic potential here between “soar” (S-O-A-R) and “sore” (S-O-R-E) is very apt, because in my own experience of beauty, if I am paying good attention, it really is something of both: a cocktail of bliss and pain together, and inextricably so.
Is this not our experience of the child Jesus and Christmas, too? The extravagance of God’s love made manifest in a newborn, as well as the sting of having our desire for the infinite only finitely satisfied. The joy of time with family and coming home, as well as the pains and dysfunction that remind us that we are still on the way to our true home. God humbles himself at Christmas, and he finds ways of humbling us so that we can receive him and give ourselves to others all the more. And, of course, like all the beauty in this world, Christmas comes to an end. In a few short weeks, the boughs will be brittle and thrown away. As Martin notes, our sense of painful and delightful longing “is often accompanied by an awareness that whatever beautiful phenomenon we are perceiving is at the very same time something passing away.”
In the meantime, let us decorate our homes to give them some of the glory fitting for and shining from the newborn king. Let us teach our children the joy of his coming. And let us prepare our hearts to receive that joy ourselves. For we adults need it as much as the children do, if not more, and the glory of the newborn king reveals the inner life of God.
Image by jorisvo and licensed via Adobe Stock. Image resized.
