Christmas: Magic and Miracle

Christmas: Magic and Miracle

By Foy Valentine, Founding Editor

Christmas is a magic word.

It is laden with a thousand images.

Images bright and beautiful, warm and wonderful, exciting and joyful.

Christmas, however, is more than magic.

It is a miracle. It is God’s doing.

Like a treasured gold coin, Christmas has two sides. One is magic; the other is miracle. One is natural; the other is supernatural. One is of the earth, earthy; the other is straight from the heart of God, heavenly.

It is right for us to affirm both, to reject neither, to embrace the whole.

Christmas, of course, means different things to different people. Country people have a take on it that is different from city people. Children understand it differently from adults. Poor folks face it with different recollections and different expectations than the rich. The Americans and the English, in spite of our common language, experience Christmas in quite different ways. Germans and Italians have significantly different perceptions of the season. Christmas celebrants in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres naturally mark the occasion in strikingly different ways. The dour Puritans rejected the holiday altogether, seeing it as a popish practice with which true believers should have no truck; but faithful Roman Catholics were admonished by no less an authority than Pope Gregory I in 601 A.D. to “celebrate a religious feast and worship God by their feasting, so that still keeping outward pleasures, they may more readily receive spiritual joys.”

Only God in heaven now knows, of course, actually when Jesus was born. Various dates were vigorously debated for the first five hundred years of the Christian era. January 6, March 25, and December 25 were front-runners in the speculation; but May 20, April 19 or 20, November 17, and March 28 were all put forth and stoutly defended. About 245 A.D. Origen, one of the most prominent of all the early church fathers, argued against celebrating Jesus’ birthday at all, sniffing “as if he were a king Pharaoh.”

December 25 was observed by pagan Romans as a feast day related to the sun; and pre-Christian era Britons observed December 25 as Mother’s Night. Because of the winter solstice, falling on December 21 or 22, when the days begin to be longer with daily increase of light and decrease of darkness, and there was universal recognition of this major natural phenomenon, there came to be gradual acceptance of December 25 as an acceptable new feast day when the birth of Jesus could be appropriately celebrated. Roman Catholics set aside the four Sundays prior to December 25 as the “Advent season” ending with their midnight Eucharist, Christ’s mass. Thus the term Christmas metamorphosed over nearly two thousand years to become what it is today.

The associations related to Christmas which I find most deeply embedded in my psyche are those formed when I was quite young: a well-formed but always smallish cedar tree cut from our own woods, a very few little packages (remember that this was in the heart of the Great Depression), fine, big fires in our living room fireplace, stockings stuffed with apples and oranges, nuts, and few pieces of candy, and lots of wonderful food—chicken and dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry sauce, candied yams, hot biscuits, and homemade fruitcake. My best things, though, were the fireworks—firecrackers, sparklers, and Roman candles.

Surely these are the kinds of things that Pope Gregory I must have had in mind with his reference to “outward pleasures.” They certainly pleasured me.

And why not?

In his Christmas oratorio “For the Time Being,” W.H. Auden has the Magi to say, “To learn to be human now is the reason we follow this star.”

The magic of Christmas lets us affirm our humanity, the fruitcakes and firecrackers, the chicken and dressing, the mashed potatoes and hot biscuits, and all the other pleasures of hearth and home.

Oh, I suppose there will always be hair-shirted Puritans who want us to be miserable, to eat no fruit salad and to shoot off no firecrackers. These Grinches would without a qualm, steal the fun and wonder of Christmas from little boys and girls, and from the rest of us as well. However, like Paul who knew not only how to be “abased” but also how to “abound,” I am inclined at this Christmas season to the abounding option, learning better, like Auden’s wise men, how “to be human now.”

I invite you, then, to join me this Christmas to revel at the twinkling lights, to join in joyful singing of “Here Comes Santa Claus” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” to read together again as my father used to read to me when I was a boy sitting in lap, “Twas the night before Christmas . . . ,” to indulge in a second helping of chicken and dressing, to throw another log on the fire, and to splurge by giving something extravagant to someone you really love. Salute the magic. Merry Christmas.

Now lest you slam judgment on me for being obscenely hedonistic, please stay tuned.

Christmas is also miracle.

In Jesus Christ, God has become one of us. Identifying with us in the incarnation, the eternal Word of God has been made flesh, and the Reason of God has been thus expressed in a language that everybody can understand. As we are told in the beginning of the Gospel of John, God’s light has shined in the darkness, enlightening everyone, and full of grace and truth so that in the miracle of Christmas we behold the glory of God Himself and are enabled to experience salvation, full and free which is God’s gift to all who in repentance and faith come willingly to Him.

Christmas is the best time of the year.

Bask in its sunshine.

Warm by its fire.

Join in its Hallelujah Chorus.

This article was written some years ago and is included in Foy Valentine’s last book, Whatsoever Things are Lovely (2004). Copies are available through CET.