The holidays can put a lot of pressure on already busy families. There is the time pressure, as parties and get-togethers and outings and travel crowd already overloaded calendars.
There is the financial pressure. Americans will spend more than $2.8 million every minute of the shopping season, or more than $4 billion a day, and it won’t all be cash. Undoubtedly, much of that will be spent on credit, with bills arriving to haunt shoppers in January and February and March and April and May and on and on and on.
There is the pressure of expectations, met and unmet, which can run higher during December than at any time of the year. Some people expect so much of decorated trees, beefsticks, sentimental music and cold weather, and are dashed when little Sally is still spoiled, Uncle Bob still goes off on politics, and Iran is still pursuing nuclear weapons capability. These people demand so much of that last thin page of the calendar and are thus let down sharply.
Children have a hard time, too, as they begin to assume expectations heightened by all the advertising with which they are bombarded, until by Christmas Eve they are ramped up, and amped up, to receive truckloads of toys and can’t possibly be satisfied by the reality of toys that, frankly, just aren’t as much fun as they looked.
Last year I wrote a column about how it can be hard to celebrate holidays with family or friends who don’t share your own values. It turns out that I received a larger response to that column than to any other I’ve ever written. You might remember that one woman wrote:
Every year for the last 12 years, I have spent Thanksgiving at my mother-in-law’s house. Lots of T.V alcohol, crude talk, smoking…..everything I don’t want my children around. Not to mention the contradiction they see from what they learn in church and at their Christian school. We have no prayer with our meals and no discussion about the meaning of what we are celebrating at her home.
For others, it isn’t even the disagreements with family or the inconvenience and frenetic pace. You know as well as I do that for some sweet folks, the holidays can be clinically depressing. Some are without loved ones, whose absence is acutely felt around Christmas. Some wrestle with ex-spouses over child custody questions, particularly vexing over short holiday vacations. Others struggle with issues related to alcoholism and drug use. Some of our best friends, maybe some of you, get weighed down by depression. A woman who struggles with depression shared her outlook, and wrote:
Tempers flare as we’re thrown together with relatives whom we see infrequently, and don’t necessarily enjoy spending time with. Expectations are high that this season will be magical and perfect as we try to recapture the wonderment we felt as children waiting for Santa, or wait for a rush of emotion as we ponder the religious significance of Christmas. When those feelings don’t automatically well up, we’re disappointed.
So, before we plunge headlong into these holidays, we ask the question, “How are we to approach them?” Can we enjoy them? Can they be a positive thing for our family, rather than a pain and a detriment? When there is so much talk of “surviving” the holidays, can we look forward to actually enjoying them?
I think we can. And some of the keys to enjoying the holidays are just common sense rules for healthy living. You can find these in any article on “surviving” the holidays: make a schedule, limit your obligations, watch what you eat, get enough sleep, set a budget before you begin spending, limit or eliminate your alcohol intake, entertain and decorate simply, lower your expectations of loved ones, connect with someone less fortunate, shop on Tuesdays and use gift bags instead of wrapping paper.
Those are all useful tips, and wise Christians will take advantage of such thinking. But is there more? As disciples of Jesus, does surviving the holidays amount only to serving pizza instead of turkey and hanging just two strings of lights and not ten?
I think there is soooo much more to it than that. In fact, I don’t think our goals should be to simply “survive” the holidays, but to appreciate them more than anyone else. After all, if Thanksgiving is the holiday for gratitude, who better than admitted sinners, redeemed not by their own niceness but by God’s grace, to gush with thanks? If Christmas is supposed to be a “Happy Holiday” and the “season of sharing” in which even hardened editors of newspapers and agnostic world leaders bluster about peace on earth, who more than Christians, for whom Christ came to earth and died that we might have real peace, to contentedly revel in the simple yet supernatural truth of the holiday’s reason for existence? Thanksgiving was designed for Christians. And Christmas? Christmas made us Christians! Christmas doesn’t belong to Wal-Mart. It’s ours!
We don’t need to feel conflicted, or schizophrenic, about Christmas. I know some Christians wonder if it’s right to celebrate Christmas. We all know religious types who don’t celebrate Christmas and that makes us worry if it’s right, or biblical, to celebrate Christmas. Well, sure it is. As the authors of Second Helvetic Confession wrote:
Moreover, if in Christian liberty the churches religiously celebrate the memory of the Lord’s nativity, circumcision, passion, resurrection, and of his ascension into heaven, and the sending of the Holy Spirit upon his disciples, we approve of it highly.
So it is right for us to celebrate Christmas, and not wrong for us to mark Thanksgiving. But as author Doug Wilson points out in his excellent My Life For Yours: A Walk Through the Christian Home (2004, Canon Press), that a thing is right doesn’t mean it’s always handled rightly. He writes,
The fact that something is lawful does not mean that those who handle it are doing so lawfully. Marriage is lawful. Can it not be abused? Beer is lawful. Is there no such thing as drunkenness? Guns are lawful. Is there no such thing as being a bad shot? The mere fact that God-honoring practices like Christmas observances in the home are lawful doesn’t mean that the thing is being celebrated rightly.
So there is the real question: how do we celebrate these holidays rightly? Here are my suggestions:
First, dump the spirit of Christmas. You sentimental types, please hear me out. There is no such thing as “the spirit of Christmas.” Christmas is just another day on the calendar. Days do not have spirits. Legal holidays have no power. Christmas cannot change you, it cannot change Iran’s leaders, it does not have the power to make you happy or meet your expectations, or those of your child or your mother-in-law. Talk about the “spirit of Christmas” is nonsense at best, at worst, it can be idolatry.
Again, Doug Wilson writes,
One of the great idols of our age is sentimentalism, and one of the times of year when the power of this idol is most evident is at times like Christmas. Note that the problem is not the existence of affections, or sentiment, but rather whether they speak with a voice of authority. When we make idols out of wood and stone, the problem isn’t the wood or stone. The problem is what we are doing with them.
He is saying that the problem is not the emotions that may accompany Christmas, but the importance we ascribe to those emotions, or the expectations we have of certain emotions over others. If we stop ascribing to those emotions power that they don’t have, we’re much less likely to be disappointed when they fail us, and much more likely to find our joy in the real reason for Christmas, which is based not in my emotional state but in objective history.
Second, embrace the Spirit of God. Only God is rightly worthy of our adoration and confidence and joy. So as we wean ourselves from some idealized and sentimental addiction to storybook Christmases, we should replace that with a very rational and reasonable and clearheaded exuberance for the non-fiction message of Christmas: Jesus, God incarnate, was born of a virgin in Bethlehem’s manger, both to bring glory to His father and to solve your biggest problem! Sally may be a brat, Uncle Bob may be too opinionated, the turkey may be dry and your dreams of a storybook Christmas impossible, but nevertheless unto us a child was born, which was Christ the Lord. He can save you; Christmas can’t. He can give purpose in life; gifts can’t. Our relationship with Him fills us with joy and peace; our closest friend or dearest loved one can’t. Embrace Christ, not Christmas. Celebrate the reason for the celebration, don’t celebrate the celebration.
Third, do this each Lord’s Day (not just Christmas!). Remember, the Lord’s Day should take precedence over Christmas. Christmas is optional. The Lord’s Day, Sunday, is not. It’s biblical. So if we make a big deal of Christmas, but are very lazy or casual about Sundays, we’ve got it backwards! One author points out that getting all excited about Christmas but being bored with Sunday is, in essence, substituting the traditions of man for the commands of God. Remember Mark 7:6-9, where Jesus accused the Pharisees of just that:
He replied, "Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: " ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’ You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men."And he said to them: "You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!
Fourth, (and this is the key) do at Christmas what you do on the Lord’s Day. What do we do on the Lord’s Day? Very simply, we sing worshipful hymns of praise to Him, we discuss His word, and we enjoy rich fellowship. Now compare that to what some people do at Christmas. What do we do at Christmas? We gorge ourselves, we overwork our credit cards, and we sit in a stupor in front of the boob tube. No wonder we’re let down. The key is to do at Christmas more of what we do on the Lord’s Day. Replace our emphasis on things and food and entertainment with an emphasis on worship, God’s word, and rich fellowship, all surrounding our celebration of God’s gift of the babe in the manger. This is the key. And the beauty of it is that, in some ways, this is so easy to do at Christmas. Here’s why.
What do we sing at Christmas? We sing Christmas carols. Christmas carols are loaded with truth and people love singing them. Even people who don’t believe one word of them (being most of the folks singing them this season) love singing carols. So that’s something to start with in your family, believers and unbelievers alike. What a precious time that can be: believing members of your family, or believing friends, gathered around a tree perhaps, or a nativity scene, singing the excellent hymns of Christmas.
What do we discuss at Christmas? God’s word, showing how prophecy came to pass over hundreds of years when Jesus fulfilled the Bible’s predictions by his birth. Here at BCC, we hand out handy Advent readings for just this purpose, so you can mark the month of December with the scriptural background to the miracle of the incarnation. On top of the advent readings, we’re surrounded by important symbols for Christmas at that time of the year, but they won’t talk for themselves: we need to talk them up with our friends and family. Why do we enjoy a feast? Why do we give gifts? Why do we top the tree with an angel? And there are tons of other resources available to Christian families that can help.
And with whom do we enjoy rich fellowship at Christmas? Why, other believers, of course. We do have obligations to unbelievers, and Christmas presents a wonderful opportunity to share the love of Christ with them. But for a real oneness, we look to other believers: through Home Groups, small groups, Sunday worship services during the Advent Season, our Christmas program and Christmas Eve service, and a pie baked with a brother or sister to bless someone else. We can fill our calendar with goofy and awkward parties but the real joy of Christmas comes out in rich fellowship with others who look at the babe of the manger and see a savior, not those who look at the calendar and see lists of gifts to be bought.
I read a lengthy and interesting article from Atlantic Monthly that distilled the results of the investigation into the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy. To make a long and very complicated story short, it turns out that the Columbia broke up, with all souls lost, because a piece of foam broke off the ship at launch. It only weighed 1.7 pounds, but at high speed it tore a hole in the leading edge of the wing that doomed the Columbia on its reentry into the earth’s atmosphere. What happened was that that hole created a void in the otherwise heatproof exterior of the ship. The very high temperatures experienced at reentry got into that wing and it just vaporized from the inside out, until finally the wing blew off in the seconds before Columbia’s crew might have learned what happened.
Even as I read that, I imagined that to be a very fitting metaphor for what happens to us when we allow our heart to be penetrated by what is so worldly about Christmas: the preoccupation with gifts and entertaining and entertainment vaporizes us from the inside out and destroys our joy at what should be a delightful time for disciples of Jesus, beneficiaries of the cross on which Bethlehem’s babe would hang. Don’t let that happen: dump the so-called spirit of Christmas, embrace the Spirit of God, do this each Lord’s Day, and then just do at Christmas what we do each Sunday: sing, discuss God’s word, enjoy rich fellowship.