Mount St. Helen, 2008
The air is crisp, the leaves are crunchy. That can only mean one thing – Costco has begun selling Christmas wrap. Cue the collective groan.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done my share of griping about the rushing of the seasons and the fact that a silent night can be blown-up and put in your front lawn for $99 and a handful of cents.
But for those of us who believe Christmas to be the holiest season, we have only ourselves to blame that it has been made tawdry with tinsel and tacky singing lights.
We try to get back to the true meaning of Christmas by eliminating St. Nicklaus or by limiting gifts to the number of magi. Yet we barely have joy for the world for a day, much less a whole month.
How is it we send cards proclaiming the hope of the world yet stand in the post office line to mail them feeling hollow and haggard?
Christmas was never meant to be celebrated. That’s not what the wise men, the shepherd boy or the weary mother did. They bowed down. They worshiped.
There, wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in the-almost-assuredly-not sweet smelling hay, illuminated by the eastern star was an Extinguishing Light.
You visit a tear-stained mother in the NICU, her tiny child in an incubator fed the breath of life by tubes and wires; the outcome etched on the doctor’s face. You don’t take candles and a cake.
Yet we dress up Christmas like this year the story may have a different ending. Like we can glitz away, just for a day, Gethsemane or a tomb.
I don’t want to forgo the carols, the lights or the presents under the tree. It was the magic of my childhood, and I want it to be my children’s too.
But I also want to celebrate Christmas like I know the ending. This season, I want to admit that sorrow was born because of, and for, me.
Stay tuned for more. I don’t actually know what the more is, just that it’s coming.
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