Jingle Bells and sleigh rides and chestnuts roasting on an open fire—a Jewish people oppressed by the Romans; living in captivity, traveling great distances to pay taxes to another nation.
Candy Canes and Christmas Trees and toys for every child—an anxious and agonizing night of labor without a doctor; the painful birth of a child who did not belong to either parent.
Jolly O St. Nicholas and cute little elves and eight flying reindeer—Poor, toothless, smelly, unshaven shepherds huddled around a wrinkled baby in a barn behind an inn with no vacancy.
The sweet fragrance of candles and the pleasing aroma of pine and fir—the foul stench of animal waste and the raw odor of wet straw.
Coming home to Christmas caroling on the lawn, stockings on the mantle and wreaths on the windows—the desperate escape to Egypt like homeless refuges; the slaughter of innocent children by Herod’s sword.
Pumpkin and Pecan pies, smoked ham and deviled eggs, the exchange of gifts wrapped with brightly colored paper and a bow—the disciple’s betrayal and denial, the arrest and the persecution, the crucifixion and the death and the tomb.
Have you ever wondered why we’ve reduced the realness and the harshness of true Christmas into an occasion to feel at home with—a sentimental time of warmth and coziness? Perhaps it is because true Christmas frightens us. Perhaps we are afraid of who it calls us to be and where it calls us to go. So, maybe without realizing it, we conceal it. We string it with lights or put a bow on it.
We take the cold, harsh, simple manger scene, and we decorate it. Although there is no mention of three kings in the Bible, only Magi, foreign astrologers, who appear in Jesus’ house months after his birth, we insist on embellishing our nativity scene with kings. We want majesty. We want glory.
Although there was no star hovering over that stable (the star appeared later with the Magi) we hang it there anyway. We want splendor, so our nativity scene, by golly, is going to have a star!
Our nativity scene is quite unlike that cold night in Bethlehem. Our nativity scenes have royalty, a star, beaming halos on everyone. Our Nativity Scenes have shepherds who bear little or no resemblance to poor rural farmers who work and live in fields. Our shepherds look more like church choir members preparing for a cantata. In our scene, the animals, why, the animals are smiling! Our scene has a little drummer boy!
Because of our fear of it, our Christmas looks nothing like the harsh reality of that night in Bethlehem. The night God came. The night God was born homeless in a stable with animals and poor shepherds to later be crucified with loathsome criminals.
True Christmas scares us for who it calls us to be and where it calls us to go. For true Christmas looks more like the make-shift houses of card board boxes in dark alleys for the destitute homeless. True Christmas smells more like a nursing home or perhaps a prison cell. True Christmas feels more like the cold, wilted hand of a dying AIDS victim, or the confused, wearied face on an Alzheimer’s patient. True Christmas tastes more like the bitterness of loneliness—it is as sour as cancer, it is as bland as death.
During the last few Christmases before my maternal grandmother died, Nana stopped purchasing a live Christmas tree. She would go into the attic and bring a very small, two-foot tall, artificial, plastic tree that was already decorated, place it on the top of her television set and just plug it in. It was the only decoration in the house.
As grandchildren, we thought we understood. We thought that as Nana got older, no longer possessed the energy or the strength to decorate her homes as she once did.
However, as I have grown older and as I have experienced more than my share of the harsh reality of living in a fallen and broken world, I have decided that my grandmother’s meager Christmas decoration was not a consequence of someone becoming tired and weak, but the outcome someone of grasping the genuine hope of Christmas.
Maybe, just maybe, Nana had grown to a point in her life when trying to cover up the true story of Christmas ran counter to what she actually needed. Maybe, in recognizing her own brokenness, her own limitations, and her own frailties, the story which we all fear and try every year to conceal became her only source of hope.
On that night in Bethlehem, in that meager stable, God came into a broken world of suffering and pain. God came to an oppressed people living in captivity. God came and experienced the pain and the heartache and heart break that we all experience in life. In the words of the prophet, God was “despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity.”
In her own suffering and in her own infirmities, perhaps my grandmother grew to no longer fear the true Christmas story. She no longer felt the need to try to conceal it, to cover it up with lights and ornaments, but only felt the need to embrace it.
I’ll never forget what my grandfather said a couple of weeks before he passed away. It was around the first week of December—a year and a half after Nana died. Like her, he had been suffering for a year with lung cancer.
I asked, “What do you want for Christmas this year?” Granddaddy responded, “You don’t have to get me anything this year. Because I’m afraid I won’t be here this Christmas.”
“Granddaddy, don’t talk like that!” I said.
“No, son, Look at my house. I didn’t even bring Nana’s tree down this year. The only thing that matters to me this Christmas is that God came to this earth and lived and died for me. That’s the only gift I need.”
Granddaddy died on the 21st of December.
That year Nana’s tree stayed in the attic. Not because he was too old and too weak to bring it down. But because to Granddaddy, that year, that year without his wife, that year fighting his cancer and facing his death, that year recognizing who he truly was as a fallen, broken, human being, that year, if he was to have any hope in the holidays, he needed to remember the true story of Christmas. He needed to recognize the unembellished simplicity of it. He needed to see the unadorned grace of it. For Granddaddy, and perhaps for you and me, if we are to find any hope in the holidays, the true story of Christmas is best left undecorated.
Just Love 