Magic-making
So I’m thinking about Christmas this week.
When I was a child it seemed like it didn’t start until after Thanksgiving. This year Christmas displays were up after Halloween. I love celebrating things, finding excuses to do things special, but I have to admit I resent all this yuletide splatter. It feels forced on me by people who want to sell me stuff. “YOU MUST CELEBRATE!” everything pulses. “YOU MUST BUY BAGS OF HERSHEY KISSES, HOLIDAY POPCORN, COOKIES FOR DIPPING IN TEA. YOU MUST GET RED AND GREEN SERVING PLATTERS AND HEARTH-WARMING WREATHS AND LOTS AND LOTS OF PRESENTS. LOADS OF PRESENTS! FOR EVERYONE!!!”
I leave stores feeling assaulted.
So the weird thing is yesterday while running errands, all that stuff initially brought a wave of nostalgia. Memories came flooding in of the childhood rituals that made Christmas magic for me, and smell so much like heaven: stringing popcorn for the Christmas tree, clipping greenery to dress the staircase, making peppernuts (a German-Mennonite Christmas cookie) and listening to the Messiah (…or Amy Grant’s first Christmas album). Traveling to my aunt and uncle’s place to bide the endless hours it took for morning to come and breakfast to get eaten and one of the gospel Christmas stories read before gifts could get opened. It was magic. So full of familiar. So full of things I could count on.
But my nostalgia quickly turned to bewilderment. I’m all grown up now. The traditions of my childhood have mostly disappeared. It’s up to me to try to turn my nostalgia into new traditions, new ways of making the season holy. But here’s the rub: apart from that initial reminiscence, when I’m out on the streets and in stores, I mostly feel rebellious, bucking at Lord Consumerism. "Stuff” is hardly what I want to pour celebratory resources into—monetary or otherwise. My mind turns to Jesus, and for just that second I wonder how to celebrate this wondrous hero, this embodiment of what I most admire, when in the very next breath I’m bucking all over again, and this time at the Church. Something about making of Christ an idol, making from his life cathedrals and choirs and committees commissioned to legislate goodness, making industries of music and books and tapes and training institutions that say, in Christ’s name, who’s in and out and on God’s side, making all the glitz and glitter of Advent a larger than life affair—something about all of that feels too much like what I see at the mall. Too much like a good idea blown way, way out of proportion, turned into something far from its seed. If blessing those we love with gifts can be turned into assault, I guess the commemoration of Jesus can too—this man who stood in solidarity with underdogs and challenged most things rich, most things religious, most things institutional and people sure they had God figured out. This guy who refused royal treatment and was shy to be named or lauded too loudly. Is there not irony in this? Irony in the accounts we have of him, juxtaposed with the ways we think to honor him?
I want this Advent season to have magic. I want to not take myself or our crazy culture too seriously. I want to be like a duck, and that pulse to buy and to idolize Jesus like water, forming a pond for me to play in without getting wet, rich mud-banks to mine for grubs. I want to not mistake that pulse for nourishment, and neither its flip-side, righteous indignation. I want to take the irony of an anti-Christ Christmas—religious or not—and laugh at it, even as I go about trying to honor the season and the man with the values I hold, the company I keep, the stories I tell. I guess if I’m able to do all of that, I’ll be seeing all the magic I could wish for.