Essential Christmas

A Christmas reflection for a secular age.

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One more note. I’ll be taking a break during the Twelve Days of Christmas. I’ll be back when the New Year begins. In the meantime, Christmas blessings of peace, love, and joy. And now, here’s the Christmas reflection:

Essential Christmas

Apple Music began streaming holiday playlists just before Thanksgiving. One of them is called Essential Christmas. It consists of pop standards like Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” and Justin Bieber’s “Mistletoe.” There are oldies by 20^th Century crooners like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra: “White Christmas” and “Jingle Bells.”

Maybe you think that I should balk at the title of this playlist: Essential Christmas. Why, these are secular tunes. They say nothing at all about Jesus. Nothing about who he is and what his birth really means for humanity. The essence of Christmas is the Incarnation. As the late Frederick Buechner put it, “The Word become flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed.”

Photo by D A V I D S O N L U N A on Unsplash

But I am not offended by that playlist’s title at all. Actually, I’m sort of grateful, because it announces a reality that we would do well to acknowledge. As a culture we now celebrate two Christmases simultaneously: secular Christmas and religious Christmas.

Essential Christmas is a near-perfect expression of secular Christmas. It focuses on seeking and achieving a state of mind that we often call the Christmas Spirit. That spirit involves the joy of togetherness, hope for better days ahead, goodwill toward others, generosity, and even the inspiration to become a better version of yourself.

Wanting to feel love, hope, and joy is a good thing. Wanting to be a better you is a good thing. The problem with secular Christmas is that it doesn’t really explore why we’re not like that all the time. And as a result, secular Christmas urges us to become a person saturated with Christmas cheer but doesn’t tell us how to become such a person. Secular Christmas just tells us that December is when that’s supposed to happen and leaves it all up to each of us individually to get with the seasonal program

Unintentionally, secular Christmas reveals something essential about us precisely when we find ourselves unable to feel even the least bit Christmas-y: no matter how many parties we attend, how many playlists we stream, how many Christmas lights we string on the tree. We find that we want something—we want to be a kind of person—and we cannot seem to pull it off. No amount of our own willpower or intellect or personal enlightenment seems to lift us out of the mire we keep slipping back into

Adoration of the Shepherds, Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich (1712-1774)

Anne Lamott gets at what I’m trying to say when she describes her friend Tim:

[Tim] craved a reset, freedom from the same ten worries and concerns, freedom from the same ten things he was mad about, freedom from the obsession with the bathroom scale. Freedom from the perfectionism, the disappointment in himself, the dissatisfaction that has run like an underground river through him for a lifetime. Freedom from dragging this all along with him everywhere like a dinosaur’s tail. He longed to feel more peaceful, more present and alive.^[1]

We really do want a life radiating with the Christmas Spirit. Only, we are not able to produce that life or sustain that life each day over a lifetime. Our own spiritual, emotional, and intellectual resources are not up to the job. The power to give us such a full-hearted life lies beyond us and above us. In other words, we need a savior to make us whole, to bring us to life, in the way that we dream of.

Religious Christmas includes an explanation for our repeated failures to be Christmas people all year long. C. S. Lewis couched it in these terms in an essay called “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans.” We are sick, and we need a cure. There is a divine order to things. A very real Right and Wrong, Good and Evil. Just and Unjust. We are out of alignment with it. And we need God to bring us back into alignment. We cannot do it for ourselves.

And there lies the essence of religious Christmas. The cure, that power to restore us—the God who created all things and who sustains all things—came down to dwell among us. Or, as the angel said to the shepherds that night:

I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger. (Luke 2:10-12)

Photo by Stephen Andrews on Unsplash

In Jesus, God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Jesus brings tranquility to our hearts and peace between even the bitterest of enemies. Heals our wounds and forgives us for the wounds that we have inflicted on others. Jesus replaces our hearts of stone with hearts of flesh. And he does this, as Paul writes to Titus, “not because of any works of righteousness that we [have] done, but according to his mercy.” (Titus 3:4-5)

The invitation of religious Christmas is for us to take the cure. To say yes to God’s yes to us. Or, as the beloved old hymn puts it:

How silently, how silently,
the wondrous gift is giv'n!
So God imparts to human hearts
the blessings of His heav'n.
No ear may hear His coming,
but in this world of sin,
where meek souls will receive Him still,
the dear Christ enters in.

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Coventry Carol

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[1] Anne Lamott. Somehow: Thoughts on Love, (New York: Riverhead Books, 2024), p. 28.