[Greetings, friends, from Omaha! I’m back in the Midwest for the Holidays. It will be a couple of weeks of real winter that we don’t really get in Austin, Texas. Snow crunching beneath the shoes, cold winds biting the bones, Jack Frost nipping at the nose, and maybe even an icy river plunge or two (if I’m lucky!).
Believe it or not, I’m looking forward to it. Partially because I no longer live in it for six months of the year (and now get to just “visit”), but mostly because of what it means: Christmas time is here.
Growing up, Christmas was always a big deal in our house. A tree in every room, cookies always in the kitchen, large helpings of comfort foods, hot teas, and a heavy dose of family. Like many of us, I took it for granted as a kid—rarely noticing the beauty of the trees, always insisting we skip the long car rides staring at Christmas lights, and enjoying the cookies only for their taste. Despite my mother’s attempts to drill the true meaning of Christmas into me, I always wanted to rush through the season and get to the part where we opened the presents.
Not anymore. Now, I don’t crave the presents; I crave the Spirit of the season. With figures and symbols like Christ the child, Santa Claus, and the Christmas Tree,1 Christmas is an enchanted season when the impossible is possible, and the veil between worlds is thin. Christmas is when we are invited to walk backward in history and return to the eternal Spirit that runs through it. To honor that Spirit, the rest of today’s essay is devoted to it.]2
“Christmas belongs to an order of ideas which never really perished, and which is now less likely to perish than ever.”3 Like all great holidays and traditions, Christmas is an annual invitation to travel backward in history and return into the warm heart of something much older than us. It is, in the words of Chesterton, a boomerang that comes bearing blessings.
The return of old things in new time, by an established and automatic machinery, is the permanent security of men who like to be sane. The greatest of all blessings is the boomerang. And all the healthiest things we know are boomerangs—that is, they are things that return. Sleep is a boomerang. We fling it from us at morning, and it knocks us down again at night. Daylight is a boomerang. We see it at the end of the day disappearing in the distance; and at the beginning of the next day we see it come back and break the sky. I mean, we see it if we get up early enough—which I have done once or twice. The same sort of sensational sanity (truly to be called sensation because it braces and strengthens all the sensations) is given by the return of religious and social festivals. To have such an institution as Christmas is, I will not say to make an accident inevitable, but I will say to make an adventure recurrent—and there, in one sense, to make an adventure everlasting.4
By returning our attention to the origins of what we call Christmas, we journey, in a way, to the center of ourselves—who we are and where we come from. In revisiting the places where Christmas came from, we rekindle the embers smoldering in our bellies. We become carriers of the eternal Spirit. Bringers of the everlasting sunrise. Forever making the world “conscious of a particular truth” worthy of remembrance.
The Birth of a Baby
The story of Christmas, told in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, starts in a small town in ancient Palestine on a night when the inns and streets were packed. None but those watching the stars were looking for the arrival of a redeemer. Fewer still expected to find Him homeless and furthest from the throne, born in a cold and dark place, where His cries were muffled by the livestock surrounding him. At the center of extremes, Christ arrives not in a castle but in a neglected outhouse—the highest of highs enters our world in the lowest of lows. In his poem, The House of Christmas, G.K. Chesterton describes the evening this way:
There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome…
To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.5
At its foundation, the story of Christmas is of the birth of hope. Of light arriving in the darkness. Of dawn coming after a long night. Of Heaven landing on Earth and offering a bridge between the worlds. Of a child that saved, and will save, us. Of a newborn with the invisible strength to move and sustain the stars.
The Rise of the Gift-Giving Elder
After Christ, Santa Claus is probably the figure most associated with Christmas. Many now see Santa as a sort of secular substitute for Christ, but long before Santa was a sleigh-riding symbol of a materialist society—a man made fat and jolly by his consumption of pleasurable things who delivers delights to the world in the form of packages and presents—he was a saint. Saint Nicholas.
Born in the third century to a wealthy Christian family, the Greek Saint Nicholas became famous when he took his family’s fortune and gave it to the poor.
The legend of his most famous act of secret gift-giving tells the tale of a devout man, once wealthy, who could no longer afford to pay proper dowries for his three daughters. Hearing of the family’s misfortune, Saint Nicholas uses his gained fortune to help. Going to their house under the cover of dark, Saint Nicholas dropped a bag of gold coins in an open window. When the father woke to his newfound fortune, he immediately arranged for the marriage of his first daughter, using the gold as a dowry.
Seeing the success, Saint Nicholas repeated the act of kindness, throwing a second bag of gold through the same window. Once again, on seeing the gift, the father arranged a marriage for his second daughter.
Delighted that his acts made a difference, Saint Nicholas attempted a third drop. But this time, the father, eager to thank the one giving the gold, caught the saint in the act. Embarrassed, Saint Nicholas insisted that the father tell no one. But word of Saint Nicholas and his generosity (and attempted anonymity) got out.
From there, the legends of Saint Nicholas and his secret gift-giving grew. Being the patron saint of sailors ensured that his legacy sailed with the explorers, making his likeness among the most popular in the Middle Ages. (Columbus named a port in Haiti, St. Nicholas, after arriving there on the day of the feast of St. Nicholas, December 6, 1492. For centuries, on the eve of the feast of St. Nicholas, young children have long placed their shoes near their door in hopes St. Nicholas will give them a gift.)
The longer the name of Saint Nicholas survived, the more each generation and culture added to the lore, passing down to us the image of Santa Claus that we have today—one of a fat and jolly white-haired elderly man, who sports a red and white jumpsuit, lives in the North Pole with elves who do his bidding, and uses reindeer to pull his sled around the world in one night.
It isn’t exactly the same image of Saint Nicholas, but it does still cast his shadow, which shows us something of the original figure. Even if our Santa grew more materialistic as our world did, his figure remains more than a secular substitute for Christ; he is still an indispensable symbol of the Christmas spirit.
For one, even in his current form, Santa Claus still embodies the spirit of generosity that sits as a central theme of the season. In Santa, we still see someone who extends charity to all. We also still get a figure inviting us to look at the Polaris (the North Star in the North Pole) with wonder. “Santa Claus can make his merry rounds and fly his sleigh from house to house because Christmas is a time when the impossible is possible, when ‘imagination is incantation.’” ’”6
When we watch children wait and receive the gifts of Santa with wide-eyed wonder, we are reminded of the wonder and awe with which we ought to view the gifts of the One who gave us everything. If God is the Father of lights, Santa is a son. Defending Santa as an indispensable symbol, one who touches transcendental truths, G.K. Chesterton writes:
Father Christmas is not an allegory of snow and holly; he is not merely the stuff called snow afterwards artifically given a human form, like a snow man. He is something that gives new meaning to the white world and the evergreens; so that snow itself seems to be warm rather than cold. The test therefore is purely imaginative. But imaginative does not mean imaginary. It does not follow that it is all what the moderns call subjective, when they mean false. Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there; something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imaginatioon is a sort of incantation that can call it up.7
As one of those characters belonging to the order of eternity, Santa serves, and will continue to serve for so long as we keep him alive, as a light leading back to the center of the universe and meaning of it all. If we have eyes to see, Santa reminds us to marvel at our gifts and the Maker.
Once I only thanked Santa Claus for a few dolls and crackers. Now, I thank him for stars and street faces, and wine and the great sea. Once I thought it delightful and astonishing to find a present so big that it only went halfway into the stocking. Now I am delighted and astonished every morning to find a present so big that it takes two stockings to hold it, and then leaves a great deal outside; it is the large and preposterous present of myself, as to the origin of which I can offer no suggestion except that Santa Claus gave it to me in a fit of peculiarly fantastic goodwill.8
The Christmas Call: Return to Wonder
Both Christ and Claus point us toward the call to return to a state of childlike wonder that sits at the heart of Christmas. For everything Christmas is, it is also an invitation to return our attention to the miracle that arrives at night and enter an enchanted world where the impossible is possible. It is an exercise in practicing our eternal appetite for infancy and seeing with new eyes the old we take for granted:
Perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinner and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.9
For the remainder of this Christmas season and beyond, I pray we all remember to let the child find expression in our everyday lives. Because it’s the only way we’ll ever enter the gates of Heaven. It’s only in the manger that we find our salvation.
‘Truly I tell you,’ He said, ‘unless you change and become little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this little child is the greatest in the kingdom. And whoever welcomes a little child like this in My name welcomes Me.’10
This Christmas season, I hope we all commit to being the increase in the real Christmas spirt—the spirit of the Child. Dance without wondering what the world thinks. Love like we’ve never been hurt. Play without purpose. Live without concern for the future.
[G]ive yourself permission to stop being sensible for a change and start being silly. Take a walk. Take a break. Smile, for heaven’s sake. Find something to laugh about (preferably yourself). Recover the vitality of youth. Practice the ‘eternal appetite of infancy.’ Expand your capacity for wonder. Expand your capacity for pudding. Step outside and look at the stars. Follow one and see where it leads you. Go ice-skating on a frozen lake. Go sledding on a frozen backside. Drink hot chocolate with extra whipped cream and sprinkles. Roast marshmallows over an open fire. Sing a carol with gusto. Tell jokes (even bad ones). Shed some weight. Shed some worry. Get buoyant. After all, how else will you grow young enough to enter the kingdom of heaven? How else will you wholeheartedly embrace the joys of Christmas?11
The Christmas Tree could be seen as the Cross (the wood Christ was crucified on) or the Paradise Tree—the tree that unites Heaven and Hell. The lights represent the world’s illumination and the light’s reemergence. The angel at the top of the tree might be seen as symbolic of placing the divine at the top of our hierarchy of priorities in the season.
Much of this article is inspired by reflections from Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton, written by Ryan Whitaker Smith (hereinafter, “Winter Fire”).
Winter Fire, p. 17.
Winter Fire, p. 55 (quoting G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, vol. 29, initially published in The Illustrated London News, 1913).
G.K. Chesterton, The House of Christmas.
Winter Fire, p. 81.
Winter Fire, p. 81 (quoting G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man).
G.K. Chesterton, On Santa Claus.
Winter Fire, p. 37 (quoting G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy).
Matthew 18:3-5.
Winter Fire, p. 37.