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What Christmas Is All About

Dec24

BAT_2008It’s almost Christmas, another Christmas, my fifty-second, and time for a bit of meditation on the “true meaning of Christmas.”

Charlie Brown had the right idea when he asked, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?”

I’ve enjoyed all the recipes and musical suggestions, the stories and the decorations, the sermons and the traditions as I’ve read through the blog posts for the Blog Advent Tour. I love the tinsel and lights on the Christmas tree, the fudge and the stuffing, the stockings that hang by the chimney with care, shopping especially if I can do it online, movies like White Christmas and Miracle on 34th Street, presents and ribbons and Santa Claus and Christmas cheer. It’s a full and overflowing time of year, and I fall under the spell of Christmas just as easily as any other sentimental sucker. We do it all: decorate the tree, hang the Christmas cards, buy and wrap gifts for a family of ten, bake cookies and attend parties and go caroling and read books . . . the list is exhaustive and exhausting and mostly fun.

But it’s not enough. A young friend of mine, in her twenties, has, as they say, “lost her faith.” I admit to a certain lack of sympathy for young people who have been taught the message of the gospel and seen it modeled, albeit imperfectly, and yet choose to let go of the truth, most times without even a whimper of protest or intense study to fight against the loss of the most precious thing that this life has to offer: the love and concern of the God of the universe as demonstrated in the life, death and resurrection of His Son. If it even might be true, isn’t it worth reading a few books and asking some questions to ascertain that truth? How can anyone “lose” such a precious thing as faith in a God who loves and cares for us so carelessly, like dropping a penny or a dime on the sidewalk and not even making the effort to pick it up?

Anyway, my friend, call her Sara, has lost her faith. So, I asked her what she is celebrating this Christmas. If you don’t believe in God and don’t trust in the miracle of Jesus, who is and was that very God incarnate, then what is Christmas all about? She said she wants to celebrate family and friends, that she has a good family and she just wants to have a good Christmas with them. Only one problem, my friend and her family are somewhat estranged because of Sara’s lifestyle choices. Oh, they’ll have Christmas together, probably enjoy a good meal and presents, but it won’t be a Hallmark Christmas because Sara and her family aren’t on TV with a script. They’re real messy people with real messy issues, and ultimately Family isn’t a substitute for a Saviour.

Neither is Stuff or Glitter or Conservatism or Liberalism or the New Millennium or Church or Food or Nature or any of the other dozens of things that we sometimes try to substitute for the true meaning of Christmas. Without Jesus, Christmas is an empty shell, not much to celebrate. Some of us can keep the shell game going for a long time; some even choose the empty shells instead of working to hang onto the real thing. But Christmas is about Christ, even if he wasn’t really born in December, even if you have questions and doubts, even if you’re messy or suffering or full of fear and even depression.

You can celebrate an empty Christmas and try to fill it yourself with material things and friends and family and whatever else happens to come along, but eventually, one Christmas, I predict that you’ll come up with a hollow place right at the center of your Christmas, right at the center of your life. And the only one who can fill that hole is Jesus Himself, the Word made Flesh who came to live among us full of grace and truth. If you don’t believe in that Truth, if you’re not sure Jesus really came to save sinners, then it’s worth your time and energy and material wealth to go on a search to find out if it might, possibly, maybe, under any circumstances be true after all.

On this Christmas Eve, I wish you a full Christmas, full of grace and truth, full of Jesus. Because He’s what Christmas is all about.

Christmas in Amsterdam, Holland, 1853

Dec22

The twentieth of December came at last, bringing with it the perfection of winter weather. All over the level landscape lay the warm sunlight. It tried its power on lake, canal, and river, but the ice flashed defiance and showed no sign of melting. The very weathercocks stood still to enjoy the sight. This gave the windmills a holiday. Nearly all the past week they had been whirling briskly; now, being rather out of breath, they rocked lazily in the clear, still air. Catch a windmill working when the weathercocks have nothing to do!”

Where are the racers? All assembled together near the white columns. It is a beautiful sight. Forty boys and girls in picturesque attire darting with electric swiftness in and out among each other, or sailing in pairs and triplets, beckoning, chatting, whispering in the fullness of youthful glee.

A few careful ones are soberly tightening their straps; others halting on one leg, with flushed, eager faces, suddenly cross the suspected skate over their knee, give it an examining shake, and dart off again. One and all are possessed with the spirit of motion. They cannot stand still. Their skates are a part of them, and every runner seems bewitched.

Holland is the place for skaters, after all.”

~Hans Brinker, or, The Silver Skates by Mary Mapes Dodge.

Christmas at Bracebridge Hall, 1819

Dec21

When I awoke the next morning, it seemed as if all the events of the
preceding evening had been a dream, and nothing but the identity of the
ancient chamber convinced me of their reality. While I lay musing on my
pillow, I heard the sound of little feet pattering outside of the door,
and a whispering consultation. Presently a choir of small voices chanted
forth an old Christmas carol, the burden of which was,

Rejoice, our Saviour he was born
On Christmas Day in the morning.

I rose softly, slipped on my clothes, opened the door suddenly, and
beheld one of the most beautiful little fairy groups that a painter
could imagine. It consisted of a boy and two girls, the eldest not more
than six, and lovely as seraphs. They were going the rounds of the
house, and singing at every chamber-door; but my sudden appearance
frightened them into mute bashfulness. They remained for a moment
playing on their lips with their fingers, and now and then stealing a
shy glance, from under their eyebrows, until, as if by one impulse, they
scampered away, and as they turned an angle of the gallery, I heard them
laughing in triumph at their escape.

~From The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. by Washington Irving

Christmas in South Dakota, 1910

Dec17

She unwrapped an unwieldy bundle, covered with newspapers. Out of it fell a giant tumble weed, its spiny leaves dried on its skeleton stalk; its bushy top mounted on a trunk made of a broomstick. “Do you think that would do fer a Christmas tree?” she asked.

Becky looked at the dry bush with softened eyes.

“I thought maybe I could use some plum brush fer a tree, went on the child. “But I just hate the switchey look of’em for Christmas. So when this whopper tumble weed came along last fall it stuck in our chicken wire, and I hung it up in the barn. It dried just that way, and I thought maybe the children would like it fer a tree. The little ones never seen no pictures of one, even, and they wouldn’t know if it wasn’t just like. I got a pail of sand to stick that broomstick down in. I could hang the popcorn and the light strings on the tumble weed, and put the rest around it. Do you think that would work, Miss Linville?”

“I’m sure the children would love it.”

~The Jumping Off Place by Marian Hurd McNeely

Last night and today I have been enjoying this story, first published in 1929 and republished this year by the South Dakota State Historical Press for a new generation of readers. (The cover pictured here is from the older edition since the new paperback cover is not available at Amazon.) Little House on the Prairie fans who have exhausted Ms. WIlder’s canon and all its spin-offs, should try this story of a family of four orphan children who take up a homestead in South Dakota, determined to hold down their claim for fourteen months until they can gain title to the 160 acres of South Dakota farm left to them by their beloved Uncle Jim. Uncle Jim’s death at the beginning of the story gives the children a grief that is slow to heal, but the words and plans that he left them guide them in their new life on the prairie.

The Jumping-Off Place was a Newbery Honor book in 1930. (Laura Ingalls WIlder didn’t win her first of four Newbery Honors until 1938.) It’s a wonderful story of pioneering on the Great Plains in the early part of the twentieth century. Only one caveat: one of the characters does use the phrase “ni— work” to refer to the hard work of making a life on the prairie, a phrase I’m sure was common usage in that time and place, but offensive to modern ears nevertheless.

The book is for a bit more mature readers than those who first come to the Little House books. Ms. McNeely doesn’t sugarcoat the drudgery and suffering that those who settled the Great Plains had to endure. In one scene a baby dies of snakebite in a poverty-stricken dugout home, and fifteen year old Becky, the oldest of the four children, helps to lay out the body of the little girl and prepare it for burial. Some of the settlers are kind and helpful to the children, while others are mean and ornery. I think older children (ages 11-14 or so) who like this sort of tale will read anxiously to see if and how the children hold their claim and become part of the new Dakota society.

Other read-alikes in the pioneering children and young adults genre:

Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson. Another Newbery Honor book, reviewed here at Maw Books Blog.

By Crumbs It’s Mine by Patricia Beatty.

My Face to the Wind: The Diary of Sarah Jane Price, A Prairie Teacher. Broken Bow, Nebraska, 1881 by Jim Murphy

West to a Land of Plenty: The Diary of Teresa Angelino Viscardi, New York to Idaho Territory, 1883 by Jim Murphy.

Any other suggestions?

Christmas in Switzerland, 1948

Dec16

“On Christmas Eve Georges Laurens stirred himself from his books and they all went out and climbed up the mountain and brought home a beautiful Christmas tree. Flip and Paul had been making the decorations in the evenings after dinner, chains of brightly colored paper, strings of berries and small rolled balls of tinfoil, and Flip had carefully painted and pasted on cardboard twenty delicate angels with feathery wings and a stable scene with Mary and Joseph and the infant Jesus, the kings and shepherds and all the animals who gathered close to keep the baby warm. When the tree was trimmed they sang carols, ending up with The Twelve Days of Christmas. Paul took Flip’s hand and threw back his head and sang.

On the twelfth day of Christmas
My true love sent to me:
Twelve drummers drumming
Eleven pipers piping
Ten lords a-leaping
Nine ladies dancing
Eight maids a-milking
Seven swans a-swimming
Six geese a-laying
Five golden rings
Four calling birds
Three french hens
Two turtle doves
And a partridge in a pear tree!”

~And Both Were Young by Madeleine L’Engle

Christmas in London, 1876

Dec15

“Christmas and New Year are a very merry time for some people; but for cabmen and cabmen’s horses it is no holiday, though it may be a harvest. There are so many parties, balls, and places of amusement open, that the work is hard and often late. Sometimes driver and horse have to wait hours in the rain or frost, shivering with cold, while the merry people within are dancing away to the music. I wonder if the beautiful ladies ever think of the weary cabman waiting on his box, and his patient beast standing till his legs get stiff with cold.” ~From Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse by Anna Sewell.

I wonder whose hard work and maybe even suffering we ignore in our pursuit of a merry Christmas? Sales clerks? Restaurant workers? Who else?

Black Beauty was published in November, 1877, and its author never wrote another book. In fact, she died on April 25, 1878 only five months after the publication of her classic horse story, whose aim she said was “to induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses.”

Christmas in Arizona, 1902

Dec12

“In 1902 an Act of Congress officially opened for land claims what had previously been the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation. One fellow, upon hearing the news, immediately rushed there to stake his claims on December 25, Christmas Day. He then rapidly rode on horseback to file them the next day at the government office.”

This eager beaver land claim is what gave Christmas, Arizona its name.

~The Naming of America by Allan Wolk

Semicolon Author Celebration: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Dec11

According to WIkipedia:

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (December 11, 1918 – August 3, 2008) was a Russian novelist, dramatist and historian. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet Union’s forced labour camp system, and for these efforts Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. He returned to Russia in 1994.

I actually read The Gulag Archipelago, the whole thing I think, some twenty or thirty years ago. Honestly, I don’t remember much about it —except that it was long.

Solzhenitsyn, the man, was not a perfect person. He has been accused of anti-Semitism and of a superficial Russian patriotism that ignored the deep problems in post-communist Russia. Perhaps so.
But in his 1978 address to Harvard graduates, he was not afraid to speak truth to the elite students who were there to hear an innocuous commencement speech from a famous dissident. They got more than they bargained for.

Solzhenitsyn said:

The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press. It stops at sensational formulas.

Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. One would then like to ask: by what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the communist East a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has granted Western journalists their power, for how long a time and with what prerogatives?

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it.

The speech itself is worth reading.

So today we celebrate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an imperfect man who wrote long books, showed great courage in his resistance to the oppressive system of Soviet communism, and spoke some hard truths even at Harvard. If you have something to say about Solzhenitsyn and his writings, please leave a link in the linky.

One more quote from Mr. Solzhenitsyn: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Christmas at Westminster, 1140 AD

Dec11

Christmas revelries at Westminster were lavish that year, deliberately so, as if rich fare and dramatic spectacle could somehow validate Stephen’s contested kingship, as if roast goose and spiced red wine and baker’s dozen of minstrels could make people forget the burning of Worcester, the sacking of Nottingham, the newly dug graves, and the uncertain tomorrows that lay ahead. The great hall of William Rufus had been adorned with so much greenery that it resembled the forest in which Rufus had met his death, decorated with evergreen boughs and holly and beribboned sprigs of mistletoe. The meal had been so bountiful that the leftover goose and venison and bread and eel scraped from the trenchers would feed Christ’s poor for days to come. The entertainment was equally extravagant: a woman rope dancer, a daredevil who juggled daggers, a Nativity play that offered not only the requisite shepherds and Magi but even a few sheep as props. Then the last of the trestle tables were cleared away and the dancing began, the irresistible, exuberant music of everyone’s favorite, the carol.

~From When Christ and His Saints Slept by Sharon Kay Penman. Semicolon review here.