HSCC: Poor Christmas

Poor Christmas. It doesn’t stand a chance. All the pressure people put on it. New Year’s Eve is about starting over; no one expects anything from it except maybe a kiss at midnight. But Christmas is expected to redeem the year. To make better everything that passed before it, to rewrite our failures and sorrows, and to make all of the setbacks worthwhile.

Poor Christmas. The odds are against it. It has evolved into a shopping frenzy. Retailers place their hopes on Christmas sales each year. “We can get back into the black if the man in red shakes loose enough green.” Not that people don’t notice. There will be at least a million people blogging, preaching, griping, nagging, complaining about how commercial Christmas has become. People will proudly not celebrate it because they want to show their disapproval of this overwhelming greed.

Or maybe they’re not celebrating Christmas because they’re showing their disapproval of Christianity. They will bring up the Crusades and religious wars and The Inquisition or how the religious people disapprove of their particular affection for Volkswagens. Not that the ultra-religious don’t attack Christmas, too, because it is based on a pagan holiday, you know, and the Christmas Tree actually is an instrument of the Beast Below and you don't want to know what a garland really means.

And let’s not forget how Nativity Scenes offend some people. In fact, the offended parties must often sue for millions of dollars because seeing just one Nativity Scene damages their psychological well-being to the point they can’t function and have suicidal thoughts, although sadly they never follow through.

Who doesn’t hate Christmas with its get-togethers and parties and all those presents people give us that are just wrong, wrong, wrong and obviously they don’t really know us and don’t care what we like and now we have to return them or re-gift them or finally throw them out with all the other trash? You’d have to be a fool to like this miserable holiday and all those boring, long elementary school programs it inspires. And there’s the endless, sappy, sad, stupid TV specials and movies where little Jo is dying, but the Prancer delivers the life-saving drug just in time for Romeo and Juliet to finally tie the knot and honeymoon in Paris.

Let’s be honest. We’re angry at Christmas. At the miracles never delivered. The presents Santa never brought. The people who leave us or pass away at the holidays. We don’t like our families. We don’t like our lives. We want something better, and we want it at Christmas, and it better deliver or else.

Poor Christmas. You could write a book -- and hundreds have -- about how Christmas became what it is and how it needs to change and why we’re so severely disappointed in it. And it takes the abuse because it must, although wouldn’t it be cool if one day Santa started packing heat? Or maybe those Wise Men would show how wise they really are and file a class action suit against humanity for our inability to grow up?

Christmas is what it is. It offers presents, trees, elves, Wise Men, stars, sales, family, tinsel, mangers, lights, decorations, food, and much, much more. We turn our noses up at it. It isn’t exactly what we want so we refuse everything because we want it our way or the highway. I don’t know why it comes back year after year.

But it does. Right before the changing of the year, it returns. It offers its gifts again and again and again. Unlike all the other holidays, Christmas tries. It attempts to bring out the best of us -- and does in soup kitchens and food pantries, with Meals on Wheels and Toys for Tots. Christmas has hope. Kinda silly really to keep believing after all these years that humanity is still worth it when so much evidence points otherwise, but Christmas refuses to learn better. It keeps offering a message of good will and good cheer, as tired and hokey as that is to our modern ears.

You gotta admire its sheer stubbornness. It keeps going. Year after year. Eggnog and fruitcake sustain it in ways science can’t understand. Every year it makes the trek to Bethlehem to a stable carved out of a hillside where a virgin gives birth to a king. All the smart people say it’s a fable or parable or who knows what, but Christmas doesn’t care. Christmas is only interested in that first miracle, the beginning, the chance for the world to start over, the beginning of what was to come.

Always when I think of Christmas, I think of that moment. That expectancy before the event. When the world held its breath. Shepherds and wise men would come later as would angel choruses and a thousand other changes as time advanced, but not yet. In that moment, there is only a young frightened man holding the hand of a young frightened woman in a stable in an insignificant village.

The animals rustle in the darkness.

The air is cold.

The sky is clear.

A star is giving forth a river of light.

Then there is the cry of a babe.

And it all begins again.

Believe what you will. Make of Christmas what you would. Make everything meaningless if you can. But I won't join you. I never will. If you look for me, this is where you'll find me: kneeling at that manger. And if you'd like to give me a gift this Christmas, join me. We'll sit in the silence of the cold, clear night and listen for the sound of new life.

Copyright 2009 by Stephen B. Bagley. All rights reserved.

Order Murder by the Acre in softcover from Amazon.com.
Order Murder by the Acre in softcover from Barnes & Noble.com
Order Murder by the Acre in softcover from Lulu.com.
Order Murder by the Acre in hardcover only at from Lulu.com.
Order MBTA & MBDD items and more at Oakleaf