A Christmas Reflection

A nice bit of Christmas writing by Joseph Bottum at First Things, here. Our family's Christmases do not seem so fraught with misadventures as his.

When Beth and I were first married, we spent Christmas Eve at my cousin Gary's house in Tracy. Then we would drive home very late to San Jose, celebrate our own little Christmas on Christmas day, then drive up to San Francisco to celebrate with Beth's parents. It made for a wonderfully exhausting 24 hours.

As a kid, we used to open one gift on Christmas Eve, then await the real loot from Santa on Christmas morning. There was the obligatory bath on Christmas Eve, and wouldn't you know it, as soon as we were in the bath, Santa would come. Every year! Of course, there was nothing said nor read about the birth of Jesus in our house. My dad had long since given up belief in Christianity as silly, and my mom, the lapsed Catholic who married a wayward Protestant, lived in perpetual guilt.

Still, there were times when the guilt would bubble over the top and my mom would drag my brother and I to church. This usually lasted for a few weeks. After a while, she got tired of getting two sleepy children out of bed and dressed properly early on Sunday, especially while the kids protested, "But why does DAD get to sleep in?" So our Sunday mornings would be back to the normal routine of sleeping, eating, watching cartoons, and on special days in the fall, Vikings home games.

Still, there was enough spiritual veneer from this drive-by church attendance forays that some of it stuck. I remember wandering around the house in my pajamas, singing Christmas carols at the top of my voice. "Oh tidings of comfort and JOY!" I had no idea what they meant, nor what the source of the joy was, nor even of the back story, but the sentiment sounded good. And even as a budding materialist, it even sounded better than anything Santa Claus could bring during the ritual bath.

The ritual bath. I have always wondered what was communicated subconsciously by my parents during our rituals. Was the Christmas Eve bath supposed to make us "ready" for Christmas? Was it a sort of baptism, washing us clean? Was it that Christmas was only for good little boys, freshly scrubbed, and appropriately pious (in a sort of secular way)?

I wonder about this because the point of the birth of Jesus was that he was born to remove the sin which so eagerly clings to us. Jesus was born into a world where people viciously gossiped about his unwed young mother's "condition". Into a world where inn keepers denied lodging to a young pregnant couple who had walked 80 miles to participate in a census ordered by some Roman bureaucrat who cared not at all about the hardship he inflicted on the people in the empire. He wanted numbers, man. Numbers count. People were incidental to the empire's profit. They needed counting. Odd, isn't it, that when Jesus later had crowds gathered around him that he didn't say, "Count them", but rather he said, "Feed them."

After the parents' divorce, my mom and brother and I moved to California. Our Christmas traditions were altered forever. We celebrated for many years, about ten, I think, with my relatives: Uncle Al and Aunt Rosella, and cousins Gary and Jeff. Our first California Christmas was in 1970, the year before we moved out here. The weather was warmed than in MN. There was no snow. And there were more presents at my uncle's house than I had ever seen before. It was obscene! I mean, we opened presents for hours! And he took special joy in watching us open these gifts.

I remember the one thing I really wanted was a yellow oxford shirt. Don't ask why, it was the early 1970's, when fashion taste had gone into hibernation. I mean, we thought avacado green and burnt orange were great colors, and that shag rugs were "cool". My uncle knew this, and a yellow oxford shirt appeared in one of my presents! Well, and there was also the obligatory socks and underwear, without which no Christmas is complete. (I see by the picture that the 1970's are back, fashion-wise. And people still believe in evolution or progress?)

My aunt tried in vain to provide the proper spiritual context. So after the supper of Swedish meatballs, we had to sing Christmas carols. There is something about having to sing Christmas carols that takes the joy out of them, I suppose. But the deal was we needed to sing before we opened presents. It was a small price to pay for the materialistic orgy we were about to partake in, though. So we sang about comfort and joy, when our minds were on the big box with the green wrapping paper to the left of the tree with our name on it.

And so it went for ten years, until in the early 1980's, my uncle died of a heart attack. Just like his father before him. From then on, Christmas with the Loux family was never the same. We tried to do the same things, the Swedish meatballs, the carols, the opening of presents until 2:00 a.m., and yet it was not the same. A great presence was missing.

And now here we are in 2005. Married for 25 years, with two teenagers and two dogs. We are, for the first time, parentless. Beth's parents passed away a few years ago, mine have both passed away in the last 18 months. So we approach this Christmas with a void, a hole in our hearts. The memories of joyous celebrations past haunt us. And yet today is all we have been promised. Someday, our kids will look back on these days with the same sort of fondness that I look back on my childhood Christmases.

We may not be worthy to carry on the tradition. We may not be ready, exactly. My to-do list grows longer with each passing day, not shorter. And yet this is the day of the Lord's favor. We celebrate his coming, with all its mystery and hope. And we are in desperate need of his coming.