Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on the 25th, it’s really just an ancient [INSERT CIVILIZATION] practice, it’s just the winter solstice, it’s gone too commercial, it’s become an idol in its own right, Christianity is not about the manger it’s about the Cross, etc.
Many others have done great work answering the various claims against Christmas, and much of that work is easily accessible (I think particularly of Joshua Gibbs The 25th and Jim Jordan’s “The Menace of Chinese Food” —both very good reads).
And yet, far from being wearied by this annual renewal of antipathy towards Christmas, I am always wholesomely refreshed by it. I have come to enjoy the strange irony of the way in which those who denigrate the Feast of the Nativity celebrate it annually —indeed ritually— with loud voices and great pomp, marking it by their protestations faithfully each year. Even Scrooge, after all, keeps Christmas “in his own way” (Dickens, A Christmas Carol, stave 1). And where would Christmas be without Scrooge? We need him in our story if it is to be a proper carol. Disbelief, you see has its just purposes among us in the drama of the Incarnation —who else shall we find to play our Zechariahs and Thomases? One can’t just have a stage full of Simeons and Magdalenas. We need those who have spent time in the Valley of Doubt to remind us, when things get dark, that doubt does not hold the answers we seek in our dark nights.
It is with merriment then, a glad Christmas gaiety, that I offer the following: 40 Theses on Christmas.
God made the winter solstice. God spoke the Sun and appointed it to rule over “times and seasons”. In the fullness of time God spoke his Eternal Sun who became incarnation and is appointed to rule over all the times and seasons. Christmas is about the rising of the Sun/Son and his reign. Among the many things Pagans got wrong, the timing of Yule was not one of them.
Paganism, writ large, worshiped, in various iterations, a sun-deity who died and rose each year. Christmas neither dismisses out-of-hand nor accepts wholesale that teaching. Christmas is far more controversial: Christmas redeems that story and transforms it. Or, as Augustine suggests: “We hold this day holy, not like the pagans because of the birth of the sun, but because of him who made it.”
Far from being agnostic about dates, the Scriptures are full of time-markers (ex. “During the reign of Tiberius”). This is both useful and encouraging: Useful because it helps us determine dates (like that of Christmas); Hopeful because it tells us that God is not “outside of time” properly speaking, but, as Robert Jensen reminds us, eternally full of time. He knows the number of hairs on your head (Lk. 12.7a), and the date of the Incarnation. Christmas, particularly Christmas celebrated on the 25th, proclaims: “Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows” (Lk. 12.7b)
For all other historical / scholarly concerns about the dating of Christmas, I have 6 words for you: this essay by Dr. Taylor Marshall.
The Bible looks favorably on birthdays (Job 1.4) and birth narratives (Gen 4.1-2, 25; Gen. 21.1-7; Gen. 25.19-28; Gen. 29.31-30.22; Ex. 2.1-10; Judges 13; Ruth 4.13-22; 1 Sam 1; 2 Sam. 12.24-25… to name a few). So also the Bible looks with favor upon the birth narrative of Our Lord and upon the annual observance of his Birthday.
The innermost part of the Temple is the Holy of Holies; the best of the songs of the Bible is the Song of Songs; the greatest of kings is the Kings of Kings. Christmas is the Birthday of Birthdays.
The kings of the earth are called to bow the knee to Christ, and to “kiss the son, lest he be angry with you” (Ps. 2.12). Christmas tells us that “unto us a Son is born” (Is. 9.6). Christmas is an annual renewal of our kiss of fealty to the royal son.
St. Paul tells the Athenians that now, after the first Advent of Christ, there was no more excuse for groping-about in ignorance (Acts 17.30). Now, God had appointed Christ, God was calling people everywhere to repent. Christmas brings repentance.
Christmas reminds us that the world is a gift. That is why we give our small shares of it away.
The Spirit of Christmas enlarges our capacity to suffer: at Christmas we often spend time with that quadrant of people in our lives (largely relatives) who most brutally exhaust us. Christmas in this way makes martyrs of us all.
The Spirit falls on those ordained to serve (Num. 11.25; Acts. 6.6). The Spirit of Christmas picks us up and makes us want to serve: ringing bells, volunteering at soup kitchens, helping with nativity plays, serving at the local shelter. Christmas makes deacons of us all.
The Spirit of Christmas is the Spirit of the Lord which drove Jesus into the wilderness (Mk. 1.12). So also Christmas drives us into the wild places of the coming new year.
Christmas induces us to generous spending: spending money on others, spending time with others, spending emotional capacity on others. Aquinas calls this kind of capacity to spend for the good of others “magnificence”. Christmas makes us magnificent.
During Christmas the ancient Furies are sated. Our demands for justice cease to be punitive. Scrooge, Grinch, Luther Krank, the Winter Warlock —Christmas produces stories that make us “pray for our enemies” and “bless those who persecute us” and “desire not the death of a sinner but that they may turn from their wickedness and live.”
Christmas trees, once cut down by St. Boniface, now stand as reminders of John the Baptist’s message to repent for “even now the axe is laid to the foot of the tree” (Mat. 3.10).
Christmas trees remind us of the life that we are called to live: “like trees planted by streams of living water” (Ps. 1).
Christmas trees remind us of the Fall of our first parents at the foot of a tree (Gen. 3) and that anyone who hangs from a tree is accursed (Deut. 21.33).
Christmas trees remind us of the Cross. And that it is from a dead tree, on which an accursed man was hung bearing the iniquity of us all, that we receive the gift of life eternal.
The gifts clustered about the foot of Christmas trees remind us of the Mother of Our Lord, who clung to the foot of the Cross receiving from those deadly boughs the lifeless body of her Christmas-baby. Christmas presents at the foot of the tree make Marys of us all.
Christmas trees, unlike the other potted plants in our houses, wither and die. Their glory fades. Christmas trees remind us that although “all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass […] the word of the Lord endureth forever” (1 Pet. 1.24a, 25a).
Like the olivine lampstand in the Tabernacle, Christmas tree illumine our places of living and eating. They tell us “this house belongs to God.”
Christmas is a time of feasting. It is a feast that lasts 12 days. Feasting for twelve days is hard work. Christmas is training for the Wedding Supper of the Lamb.
Christmas out-Marxes Karl Marx. Could Marx and Engels have proposed something more economically revolutionary than herdsman hailing a baby born under the poverty line as the head of the heavenly political order?
Christmas also out-baroques Louis XIV. Look at the performance given to the shepherds. Surely even the self-styled “Sun-King” himself could not afford such angelic ostentation and fanfare. Nor could the French regent boast of such lavish displays of fealty from the realms of the East as those given to Jesus by the Magi.
As Joshua Gibbs notes incisively, Christmas hasn’t been commercialized. Rather, once a year our buying and selling gets Christmatized. He notes the way that the $1 shelves at Target are full of consumer junk all year round. Once a year, however, you just might find an image of Jesus there.
Go and look up the statistics on donations and charitable giving. Compare any other month with December. Now tell me again how Christmas makes men particularly greedy.
Our lives, while active now, begin and end in total passivity: infancy and senility. On Christmas we behold that incarnate body of the Lord, the active and ever-quickening Logos, in a state of total passivity. Swaddled means bound and bundled. Unable to move. The christchild in the creche shows us what it means when God calls us to “be still and know that I am God" (Ps. 46). Christmas is a practice in being still.
“No one should be alone on Christmas” we say and do whatever we can to make sure everyone has a place to go for dinner. That’s good. God is not alone. He is three-in-one. Christmas makes us live out a trinitarian sociology.
Far from distracting us from the majesty of the Cross. Christmas intensifies it. It makes us feel the full bloody body-horror of it. As we gather around the sweet babe lying in a manger we sing “nails thorns shall pierce him through, the cross be born for me, for you.” Christmas is pregnant with Good Friday.
Christmas personalizes the Crucifixion. It wasn’t just some anonymous “Galilean Man” the Empire crucified on Good Friday. It was Mary’s boy, the son of Joseph.
Far from being artificially happy, the merriment of Christmas is born of the awareness that God has entered our darkness with us.
Or, as Chesterton summarized it: “Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.”
Far from eschewing issues of race, justice, and poverty, Christmas highlights them. Christ is born into all of the categories of person for whom there is “no room” among the proud and mighty.
Christmas humanizes charity. It is not enough to merely attend to the biological needs of the poor. That is what the offer of the stable was, a sheer provision for what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” Christmas calls us to be not merely almsgivers, but hosts. Not merely to meet needs, but to invite in and “make room for” —often making that room at some cost to ourselves.
Christmas draws the Home into the neighborhood, and the neighborhood into the home. We are drawn-out in the giving of gifts and the singing of carols, and the world is drawn in by the invitation for food and drink. Christmas is about mission.
Pagan Saturnalia merely played at transgressive and revolutionary role-reversals: slaves dressed as lords, children as old men, women as mighty warriors. But then, at the end, everything went back to normal. Christmas is truly unruly: the virgin truly became the mighty shield-maiden of the Lord, all the kings of the earth were exposed as pretenders and slaves of the Enemy, and the Lord of all the Universe came wrapped in rags. It was a true charivari. And there has been no real “return to normal” since then.
Christmas makes strange bedfellows among those who hate it: Herodians, Puritans, Communists, the White Witch, and Meister-Burger-Burger-Meister. Amidst their several differences, they have at least two things in common: 1) incarceration is the preferred mode of discipline, and 2) their ability to produce copious amounts of prohibitive legislation.
Christmas recalls God’s economy of unmerited trust: He trusts our world of violence with the fragility of an infant’s birth; he trusts Judas with the money purse; he trusts Peter with the leadership of the Church; and he calls Saul of Tarsus to carry the Gospel to the Gentiles. God’s wisdom is not a form of eternal stinginess or of self-protecting calculation. He gives what we do not deserve. Our reformed brethren can rest easy and make merry, for Christmas is about the free gift of God’s grace.
Christmas is for children. Christmas is about a child. For too long have we sought in vain for a fountain of eternal youth. Here it lays, wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. Go on, be childish for Christ’s sake —literally, for Christ’s sake.
People complain about those who “only show up to church on Christmas and Easter” without ever pausing to tremble at the dreadful magic at work in these two days. Two days where hearts cold to the touch of the Gospel all year are suddenly warmed, convicted, welcomed, and pleaded into attendance. People who by all metrics are for all intents and purposes heathen, attend the eucharist, confess their sins, sing God’s praises, and hear God’s holy scriptures on Christmas. Why? Because it’s Jesus birthday.
Of course it’s not Christmas yet. Don’t celebrate it early. Wait for it. But, when it comes, keep it well! Keep it strange and glad, keep it loudly. On then, on that day, when it comes, be merry. For this feast that is fast approaching is truly glorious.