Christmas is a surge of Amazon packages at the door. It’s that expensive rib roast you are hoping won’t be overcooked. It’s the kids leaving their expensive toys and returning just a bit too soon to the screens you wish they would shut off. It’s your holiday mix on Spotify, whether that tends toward crooners like Bing Crosby and Harry Connick Jr., or to Phil Spector’s simulacrum of Motown, or to the nearly headbanging cheer of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. It’s booked up Chinese restaurants with fully lighted menorahs. It is bad basic cable movies about leaving a life dominated by careerism and marrying the handsome hometown hero who makes cabinets or sells Christmas trees.
And that’s just the good stuff. It’s also a surge of emergency room visits — from spoiled eggnog to an unfortunate slip on the ice. It’s families being reminded of something lost. It’s the last Christmas before a broken heart, or the last before a death of the grandmother whose cooking and devotion held the whole extended family together against every centripetal force of the modern mobile world.
Christmas is midnight church traditions from Spain, and a gift-giving figure of Dutch lore that somehow, through advertising, became a red-coated fat man who eats cookies and milk but sells Coca-Cola. It’s the crèche from an Italian village transported to an American town full of Calvinists.
It’s calling upon your neighbors — whether informally, for a drink, or as part of Las Posadas. It is the retelling of a Charles Dickens story, in which a man faces a great moral battle and the chance to see his life transformed by true charity.
This is the long way of saying that Christmas is a great conglomeration, gathering to it all kinds of national traditions, gaieties, customs from across Christendom, even those things which aren’t Christian at all.
But, in its great hymns and its most ancient liturgies, the birth of the Christ child is not a Hallmark card of sentimentality. The child born in some outcropped cave is being chased by the enemy. His birth is the turning point of the battle, and the battlefield is wet with the Herodian slaughter. There is chilly, cheering, militant cry to our hymns: Hark! The herald angels sing. After centuries of waiting and pining for this day, after the great long darkness, the true king is here.
In the hymn of Charles Wesley:
Lo! he comes with clouds descending,
Once for favored sinners slain!
Thousand, thousand saints attending,
Swell the triumph of his train.
Alleluia!
Alleluia!
Alleluia!
God appears on Earth to reign.
Or in the words of the Eucharistic hymn borrowed from the Divine Liturgy of Saint James:
Rank on rank the host of heaven
spreads its vanguard on the way,
as the Light of light descendeth
from the realms of endless day,
that the pow’rs of hell may vanish
as the darkness clears away.
The prince of peace comes to us as a baby, yes, but not as a pacifist with a pacifier. He comes with the sword of judgment, the conquering truth spoken before all ages.
The original French rendering of the hymn that would become “O Holy Night” captures this theme perfectly. After calling Christians to observe the “solemn hour when the Man God came down to us,” a people, on their knees, awaiting deliverance, it bids “People, Stand up Sing your deliverance!”
Everything, every single thing is transformed by the arrival of this child. Every scrap of tinsel, every longing in your heart for a down blanket and rest, every coquettish wink under the mistletoe, every preparation of beef for the feast, along with every present under a tree, every heartache, every silly injury, every romance or family reunion. All of them are lit up in glory, by this victory march that began in Bethlehem that day. The true king has launched his final attack on the pretenders ruling this world. Rejoice!