Apparently we’re now celebrating “Season.” At any rate a retailer just sent me “Season’s Greetings,” as vague about which or why as a newspaper’s antiseptic “Happy Holidays.” I think there’s some sort of clue, about the season at least, in proclamations of “Winter Lights Across Canada,” though according to my telephone this week is actually the darkest of the year. So what light exactly is shining?
My local school board seems to have done a hasty online search and come back uncertain. It intoned that “many in our … community will be celebrating holidays or marking important occasions together. In December this includes Hanukkah, the Winter Solstice, Yule, Yalda, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Zarathushti. In early January, many will observe new year celebrations, Orthodox Christmas, and the Birthday of Guru Gobind Singh Ji.”
All these things are true. Or most of them, though I doubt there’s a huge turnout for, say, “Winter Solstice,” and their schools would not close on a weekday if Karamu happened to fall on one. But I can’t help noticing that they are staying open through Dec. 23 to sabotage children’s excitement leading up to Holiday, so if they haven’t actually stopped giving time off for whatever Dec. 25 is, they’re certainly pretending it’s just “winter holiday season.”
Really? Which season and which spirit? Can it be that of Christmas Present, and the Child born in Bethlehem?
As I’ve observed before, ersatz holidays have that certain “je ne veux pas.” You can’t celebrate thingy, or be glad just because, any more than, as G.K. Chesterton observed, you can think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. There must be some specific, actual reason you’re glad, and while skiing and tobogganing are fun, as I imagine would be a ride in a one-horse open sleigh if you and Ms. Fanny Bright didn’t get dumped into a bank by some hapless nag (or maybe that incident would make a good story for the grandkids someday), we’re talking something more cosmic.
Humans have a craving for ritual. If you won’t do the Lord’s Prayer or even the National Anthem, you’ll end up with some formulaic “land acknowledgement” by people with no intention of giving it back. Which, as redemption arcs go, strikes me as unfulfilling. But we crave ritual because we crave meaning, transcendent meaning, the invasion of “kairos” or exalted, healing, sacred time into “chronos” or humdrum, corrosive, secular time. And those who hate Christmas fear genuine meaning because truth brings enormous blessings but also imposes significant demands, like being nice to people for a change and kneeling before One vastly greater than ourselves.
It’s easy to mock Christmas, from the garish materialism of Santa ads starting before Halloween to eating candy from socks beside a dead tree. But one might also cast a gently skeptical eye over gathering to sing about a baby born to a taciturn carpenter and his pious bride 2,000 years ago if it was just another kid in some straw.
Gentle because it is touching to see atheists, agnostics, and people who worry more whether they have a green shirt than whether they have an immortal soul gathering to make a joyful noise unto a loving God to whom nothing is impossible. Including granting eternal bliss to those of His children who will heed His spirits’ counsel.
I struggle to be as gentle toward the artists, celebrities, and bureaucrats who declare Christianity dead and buried, then obsessively seek to dig up and desecrate the corpse. If it’s all superstitious nonsense bequeathed by credulous intolerant ancestors unworthy of today’s artificial light, sweeteners, and greetings, why can’t they stop checking the tomb to see if by some inexplicable marvel it is still empty?
Since it is, preposterously and wonderfully, Merry Christmas to them and to all, in keeping with the situation.
