As much as anything, Christmas is a feeling. I’m not entirely sure any of us know for certain the precise assemblage of emotions caught up in Christmas, but at the very least they include yearning, nostalgia, peace, calm, return, comfort, completeness, coziness, home, hope.
Christmas has what Walter Benjamin called an “aura,” the matter of its uniqueness based on its presence in both time and space. Time, because there comes a moment in the year (always earlier it feels) when “Christmas time is here.” Space, because the decorations come down from the attic and the neighborhood is trimmed with lights.
What makes Christmas “Christmas” is a grab bag assortment of oddities. Songs like Frosty the Snowman are just plain strange. Other popular Christmas songs are tinged with inappropriateness but still get air time (Baby, It’s Cold Outside). Meanwhile some of the great Christmas hymns are resplendent in their revelation of the numinous.
In spite of it’s grab-bag quality, there is a seeming “recipe” or formula for the holidays. Walk into a Starbucks once the pumpkin lattés are gone and peppermint mochas have returned and try not to “feel” the season.
When we lived in Slovakia for three years in the late 1990s, it was a somewhat typical choice for us, on the weekend, to get an inexpensive train ticket and ride just across the border into Hungary. Miskolc had the closest McDonalds.
I will confess to you, I cannot make any rational argument as to why periodically we would choose to travel outside Slovakia simply to eat at a McDonalds. Our home town of Košice had plenty of fine restaurants. but I can give you a “feeling” argument for why. It included some if not all of the feelings I listed above: yearning, calm, return, comfort, home were “satisfied” with a visit to McDonalds.
When we say we aren’t “feeling” Christmas this year, if such feelings are delayed, or if such feelings are impacted by other even bigger feelings like grief, it becomes all the more poignant for us, this desire to feel Christmas combined with the sense that we are at risk, sad as it might be, of not pulling it off this year.
We may attempt drastic measures, like taking that train to Miskolc.
Entirely apart from anything having to do with the birth of Christ, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father, through whom all things were made, we demand of ourselves and hope fervently with inarticulate yearnings that the aura of Christmas will arrive.
The other insight of Walter Benjamin had to do with the way our sensory perspective (our feelings) are historically and socially conditioned. That is to say, if we are using social media more, if there are different world and national political events, if climate change is a present and existential reality, then how Christmas “feels” and how we come to the aura of it is also changed.
Christmas is a work of art, but an ephemeral one, and although nostalgia and return are integral aspects of it (I still and will always remember as if etched into my soul the Christmas Eves spent in the home of my grandparents when I was a youth, right down to the warmth of the room and the position of the lights and the taste of oyster soup, and will get tingles up into my scalp and tears in my eyes just typing it out), it nevertheless does change.
Starbucks enters the scene.
So back to that one eternally begotten of the Father through whom all things were made… a part of what was made are in fact brains and hearts and minds of humans capable… no even driven… to seek the aura and feeling of Christmas. As consumer-driven and clap-trap as much of what gets delivered to our doors by Amazon might be, nevertheless in our inarticulate and desperate yearnings, we are expressing somehow, some way, a latent and powerful part of what it means to be human together.
To fend off the cold of the night in the hopes of a warming dawn,
Desperate for reconciliation and healing even with our foes,
Distracted and over-wrought and hyper-focused on some wrong things,
Humming and whistling tunes we forget for nine months but need for three,
Bringing in dry dead cut trees that give more light and life than the cat,
But that the cat will climb and the dog and cat will lie down under,
So lonely and yet so busy together, so wishing against war
But caught powerless (and honestly too lazy and apathetic) to end it,
Kindly selecting gifts for our nearest and dearest while just for once
And ever so briefly expanding our sense of family to include the whole human race,
But mostly enough to welcome Jesus, less so to stick around to defend the holy innocents.
When our first child was born, I remember strapping the new car seat in the back, pulling up to the hospital, swaddling him against the cold, scooping him up, then looked at the nurses and thought, “They actually plan to let us walk out of here with him?”
And we did. And all of that freedom and responsibility tied up in one little bundle, that is the freedom and responsibility God has extended to us through this one born, the Incarnate Logos, Mary and Joseph each in their own way faithfully loading up and walking out into all the feels, the fear and vulnerability and joy and confidence.
All of this and more is Christmas.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. May you truly feel it this year.
In Christ,
Pastor Clint
—Kelly Latimore
What a warm and heartfelt message! It really gets to the heart of the matter and also deals with the dross. Thank you, Pastor Clint, and a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.