The small holiday of a happy man

The Column: 12.06.24

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The Christmas season is a trial for us Christians who must wend our way down miles of aisles of trashy merch as musical garbage drizzles down from the speakers in the ceiling and try to keep the nativity of Our Lord in mind, no easy thing, and for this I blame Charles Dickens who took a holy occasion and hung tinsel on it. His message of cheerfulness and sharing in the face of selfish greed is all well and good but it’s not the same as the story of God come to Earth to be made man to show His love for us. One is neighborliness and the other is a miracle and a mystery.

I also blame Irving Berlin and the composers of “Jingle Bells” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and all the other standards that become termites in the brain. I hear them in the grocery store and I ask myself, “Are there no workhouses? As Scrooge said, “Are there no prisons? Are they still operating? If I had my way, everyone who goes around humming ‘White Christmas’ should be baked with his own pudding until he turns brown and be buried with a sprig of holly through his heart.”

As for Dickens’s story made into a play, it’s been awfully generous to hundreds of American theaters, a sort of National Endowment of Dickens, millions of people paying hard cash to sit down and see the wretched capitalist in his countinghouse, the visit by his cheery nephew Fred on Christmas Eve, the visit by the charity fundraisers, the departure of the clerk Bob Cratchit, the Scrooge supper, and then the sound of chains as the ghost of Marley appears, dragging his cashboxes behind him, to announce the visitations by the three spirits.

This play is what enables theaters to put on Othello and Hedda Gabler and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Which surely is a good thing and provides employment to men and women who may not be cut out to be ophthalmologists so you don’t have someone saying, “Look at my right ear” as he shines a bright light in your eye who would much rather be saying, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Anything that keeps incompetent people out of the field of medicine is a good thing, and not humbug.

But the shepherds tending their flocks by night in Judea who were summoned by the angel to go to Bethlehem to see the wondrous thing did not go to find jolly people around a Christmas tree with nice gifts and a turkey dinner with a fine wine and rice pudding. They went to confront a miracle that every Christian must believe or not believe or sort of believe or some combination of the three for your entire life, the idea that the Creator had a Son who was made incarnate and grew up Jewish only to be crucified as a fake Messiah. It’s not about snow.

I grew up among Christian literalists who were wary of the Dickens Christmas and felt that the gift-giving was a sentimental notion powered by gift sellers that misrepresented the whole deal — as if the stable were a mall and the shepherds had come to shop for ties and hankies — but my mother grew up with that Christmas so it prevailed in our home and I went along with it for decades, and then, after a Christmas spent with a very pregnant wife sort of clarified the idea of Advent, we’ve come to love the quiet Christmas. I do four Christmas shows this year and at each one the audience will stand in a darkened theater and sing, a cappella, about the silent night calm and bright, and the sound of a thousand people singing from memory and in harmony about the Holy Infant, the quaking shepherds, the radiant beams, this is Christmas enough for the old man.

I would think better of the incoming emperor if I thought he knew the words to “Silent Night” or the Nicene Creed or the Lord’s Prayer or if he found comfort and joy sitting in a pew among other believers and seekers, but of course that’s not my business. It is none the less a blessed time of year as I hike to church and if indeed God became one of us in Bethlehem then a great weight is lifted. Ignore the dark, wait for the light.

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