I watched Klaus (2019) last night with my family (we watch one Christmas film each of the 4 Sundays of Advent as we count-down to Christmas). I took my leave when the credits rolled to go to the kitchen and bawl my eyes out. Klaus is a great Christmas film.
Chiefly it concerns a bunch of rotten people: a spoiled-rotten postman, a violent-rotten town, a sour-rotten school-teacher, and a bitter-rotten widower. Redemption comes to these rotten folk through the sheer gratuity of a gift. In a scheme to inflate his quota of delivered mail (in order to get back to his comfy rotten life) the postman gets the rotten kids to ask for toys from the rotten widower. He gives them the toys. The kids marvel. The postman lays-down the condition that the kids must (in response to the gift) behave righteously or else receive a coal (coal, like fire-and-brimstone).
They children reform, they go to school to learn to write letters to the widower. The school-teacher unsours. The widower un-bitters. Even the postman’s heart unspoils.
The townsfolk lay down their ancient rivalries, exposed now for the blood-and-soil frivolities they have always been. The Erinyes which had of old danced upon the roofs of the families are abated not by more bloodshed but by a Mercy far stronger than Athena’s dictums at the end of Aeschylus’ Oresteia.
I’ll refrain from spoiling the end (some bad things happen, life is laid-down, there’s a duet of weddings, etc.), but I want to indicate the meaning in the order of the events: the answer to rottenness was a gift —and not like some metaphorical symbolic Gift, but a toy, an unnecessary play-thing, a consumer good.
Charity, operating in and through broken vessels whose lives are complicit with rottenness themselves, gives a gift, unnecessary, unlooked for, and beyond hope. The joy that comes from these gifts invokes a law that brings life and deals death to the powers of death.
People complain about the commercialization of Christmas, and poor films and even poorer sermons have labored long to try to extract some gnostic meaning of Christmas from the messy and embodied exchange of actual material goods in the form of presents given at Christmas to rotten kids and rotten adults who have their own rotten agendas. But, perhaps, such gift-giving mirrors best the unexpected Charity the world received two thousand years ago which did not come as an idea but with all of the physicality that attends mammalian nativity. The arrival of the magi, likewise, arrived with gifts —not abstraction— material things gold to be spent, frankincense to be burned with prayer, and myrrh to adorn the body of the boy to arrest its rotting when rotten people had had their way with it.
We are the rotten ones to whom good gifts are given and for whom the answer to our mutual rottenness is the gratuity of the gift which lays on us, in the giving of it, a law which leads to life.