Sunday Night Journal — December 26, 2010
When I was a child, Christmas was the most wonderful thing
in the world to me. The only thing that even came close to matching its appeal was a trip to Florida, to the white sand and blue-green waters of the beaches on the Gulf of Mexico. Not
surprisingly, I was more interested in Santa Claus and the presents he brought
me than in the Nativity of Christ. I learned fairly early that this was not
really the correct way to think or feel about Christmas, but I couldn’t help
it. Mary and Joseph and the baby and the stable and the manger and the
shepherds and the angels and the Wise Men were all very sweet, but a little off
to one side in the Christmas picture, not nearly as entrancing as the Christmas
tree and the magical surprise of the presents that would appear around
it on Christmas morning.
And yet I was conscious that without the Nativity the rest
of it was meaningless and without real delight. When I say I was conscious of
this, I don’t mean that I reasoned it out in a chain of logic—B is dependent on
A, and therefore if I want A I must also have B—or put it into words for
myself, but that I perceived, directly, that the things I loved about Christmas
could not be separated from the event it commemorates. From the time I could
read I felt that there was something amiss when “Season’s Greetings” was
substituted for “Merry Christmas.” (Even in the 1950s, there was sometimes an
impulse to make “the holidays” a generic secular winter festival; it would make
an interesting subject of study to see just how far back that goes in popular
culture and advertising, and how it developed.)
There was a seasonal or holiday magazine of sorts that
appeared in our house sometimes. It was called something Ideals: that
is, Christmas Ideals, Easter Ideals, and so on. I mainly remember
the Christmas one. It was something more than an ordinary magazine, much
heavier and thicker, really a sort of book, and as far as I can remember it
consisted mainly of pictures, stories, and poems associated with the holiday.
The Christmas one of course relied heavily on snow and evergreens and all the
other trappings of Christmas in the northern parts of the U.S. and Europe. I loved it and pored over it again and again in the weeks before Christmas for the
pleasure of tasting that sense of magical expectation that anything connected
with Christmas gave me. Some of the pieces were of the generic winter variety:
a snowy landscape with no hint of red and green to suggest Christmas, a
description of a holiday gathering which did not name the holiday. Living in a
hot climate, I felt a romantic attraction toward snowy landscapes, but in this
context I felt that something was missing if they were no more than that.
And the music: I always felt that “Winter Wonderland” had
something missing, but I think I was twelve or fourteen before I realized that
it is not in fact a Christmas song. I never even much cared for the Santa Claus
songs which left everything but Santa out of the picture.
I knew instinctively that the story of the Nativity, with
all its implications about the nature of the world and our place in it, was the
heart of Christmas. Maybe I preferred to look at the face, but I knew,
unconsciously, that it was dependent on the heart for its life.
And this was true whether or not I recognized it. Those who
celebrate a Christmas without Christ don’t recognize it, and don’t believe the
connection between the two is a necessary one. But I’m pretty sure they’re
mistaken. We can still see Christ in the popular American commercial Christmas
by his absence; it’s as if all the a-religious trappings outline his form. If
you try to imagine a Christmas which had never been founded in the Bethlehem story at all, you get something very different.
The secularizers who for various purposes of their
own—anti-Christian or merely commercial—wish to eliminate Christmas in favor of
a featureless Holiday that commemorates nothing in particular may eventually
succeed. But that Holiday will inevitably be dull in comparison with what it
replaces, and probably increasingly squalid as well, given the general drift of
our society. The particular festive spirit that animates Christmas is a product
of hope, a hope that cannot be entirely defeated by the world, because it looks
toward something beyond the world. But anything which does not look beyond the
world will sooner or later be defeated by it.
As with the holiday, so with the culture at large. The
increasingly post-Christian culture of America and Europe are nevertheless more
deeply rooted in Christianity than is usually recognized by its opponents (and
some of its adherents). It’s at least theoretically possible that this culture
will eventually get Christianity out of its system, out of the roots of its
consciousness, and negligible as a cultural force, reduced to the private
practices of an eccentric few. This would take several generations, and I don’t
think it will happen, but it certainly could. And if it did, the resulting
culture would, like Christmas, lose the hope and the humanism which had been
its legacy from Christianity. As with Christmas, if the heart were to stop
beating, the body would die.
We have seen the prospects for that new culture already, in
the totalitarian nightmares of communism and fascism, in the wasteland of
pleasure-and-power-seeking which is offered as the good life by much of the
entertainment and advertising produced by capitalism, in the drab materialist
collectivism of “Imagine” and the absurd materialist egoism of Atlas
Shrugged.
Perhaps it’s not even too much to say that if Christmas were
to die, the remains of Christian culture would die, too, and with it that
softness toward the individual human person—imperfect, of course, and slow to
develop—that has characterized it. As long as the mad mixture of the very
earthly and the very heavenly which is Christmas—the poor and vulnerable
newborn baby among the animals on the one hand, choirs of angels on the
other—remains at the heart of the holiday, and the holiday remains very much
alive in the culture, the natural coldness and brutality of the human race is
always challenged from within the culture itself. Should that challenge be
removed, no one would be more surprised by the result than those who worked to
remove it. They might not live to see that result, but if their souls were not lost
altogether, part of their purgatory might be the knowledge of what they had
done to their descendants.
Light On Dark Water 
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