Near the climax of Arthur Christmas (2011) Steve Claus (the oldest son of the 20th Santa Claus), angry that his hopes of taking over the reins as the 21st Santa Claus and his sense of achievement about the job he does to make Christmas happen each year, voices the guttural conviction that “if we all just gave into the Christmas Spirit, there’d be chaos.”
Jesus said that the secrets of our hearts will be shouted from the rooftops (Lk. 12:3). Very often the voice that does it is our own.
Steven has betrayed himself. But he’s also betrayed us, for we tend to agree with him. If we all lived saintly lives, we think to ourselves —lives like his brother Arthur Claus or the first great Saint Nicholas— there’d be chaos. “Uh-oh,” we think, “here’s another Christmas film slinging this naive Franciscan ethic all over the place.”
The fear in the voice of Steven Claus and the fear within us that protests against the extravagances of Christmas must paint the Spirit of Christmas as vanity in order to protect ourselves from the reproach our protests rightly merit. And we paint poorly when we paint false.
There is wisdom in the folly of the Christmas Spirit, not a naivete. Arthur’s break-neck journey to deliver the last toy to the child who was forgotten, is not only worth the gross damages it incurs in some spiritual way (“so that the meaning of Christmas can live-on” etc.) it is also worth (1) exposing the corruption taking root at the North Pole in which “one child doesn’t matter” and (2) really saving the whole project of Christmas. Like always, the more and more that the flesh tries to cover-up it’s wake of death, the more and more it is exposed for what it is. Like Pharaoh (and others like him, e.g. King Saul or the Sadducees) the more we try to maintain control over-and-against Yahweh, the more those very attempts of control become the source of our wasting collapse.
In one of my favorite Christmas films, Children of Men (2006) (tied for 1st place with A Muppet Christmas Carol [1992]), the same operation is at stake: a radical self-giving love which dispenses with the kind of digitization of the human person (a la Steve Claus’ reduction of human children to “% complete”) that has lead to its demise. Humanity, at the peak of its seeming control over growth, has become infertile and the world is sloshing-over the brink of chaos. It’s not the Christmas Spirit who is at fault for the chaos which teems in Children of Men, it is —ironically— the very methods of self-interested calculation.
If anyone is naive it is certainly not Theo Faron. But something possess him, arrests him, and he gives his life for the new birth of a child of men. What kind of Spirit could possibly wrench an alcoholic, semi-washed-up bureaucrat into such generous action? The Spirit of Christmas.
The Spirit of Christmas brings not “chaos” but a new order. Sure, the Spirit of Christmas brings waters down of the chariots of Pharaoh, and brings floods of paid-off debts down on the head of Henry F. Potter, and a tempest of sorrowful tears upon Ebenezer Scrooge, but the Spirit doesn’t leave us in chaos-waters, in the depths. It brings new life: Israel on the other shore, Bailey Brothers restored, Scrooge redeemed, a child born in abjection with the promise of the world (and I’m talking here about Children of Men, though its also true of Christmas Day).
The “chaos” feared by those who rule like Steve is not actually a chaos, but the birth of a new world —one in which someone else sits on the throne. The terror of the Christmas Spirit works in Steven Claus in the logic “one child doesn’t matter” just as the terror over the first Christmas took shape in Herod in the logic “kill all the infant sons of Judea.”