Visions of Sugar Plums

It’s the night before Thanksgiving and visions of Santa Claus dance in my head. A brief trip to the mall confirms that the Christmas shopping season is in full swing. Christmas decorations dominate every window display and the sound of familiar carols drift through the air. And everywhere Santa, eyes crinkling with delight, beckons. Shop here! Or there! Or better yet, everywhere! And don’t forget to have your picture taken sitting in Santa’s lap. The line of waiting children snakes past the Starbucks kiosk, explaining why so many parents are drinking from those iconic seasonal red cups.

But a Santa large enough to accommodate twins in his lap doesn’t fit the image I have of him – an image forged in childhood from that most famous of Christmas poems: “Twas the Night Before Christmas.” He is, after all, “chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf.” And a tiny one at that.

When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny rein-deer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.

“All tarnished with ashes and soot” and small enough to slide easily down the chimney, he makes a grand entrance (I suspect accompanied by a fine ash cloud). But this small figure from an 1823 poem has come to represent something a great deal larger than Clement Clarke Moore imagined when he wrote these lyrics for his children. Millions of other children have drifted off to sleep while straining to hear sleigh bells and the sound of hooves on the roof. Households all across the country are decorated every December in red and green with little Santas and sleighs to keep the magic alive. But this imagined world where time stands still so that Santa can visit every boy and girl gives way to a much harsher reality. We grow up, and we stop believing in magic.

The original Christmas knew no Santas, no gaily decorated evergreens, no Christmas goose or pudding, but it knew joy. The angel brought a message of hope: “Fear not: for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people … And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, good will toward men.” It is this event we celebrate with “Christ’s Mass.” We celebrate the promise that through the incarnation all of us can enter into a new relationship with the Creator God. One founded on the sacrificial love of his Son, Jesus. The Santa-centerpiece and the holly wreaths will soon be put away for another year, but the manger scene on the mantel reminds us of a promise that does not fade or disappoint. It is the promise of God’s peace and good will to all people. Whether we are surrounded by family or celebrating the season by ourselves, we are never alone. The love of God made present to us by the birth of his son is the promise of the angels and the promise of the ages.

This season I choose not to worry about the commercialization of Christmas nor will I preach about it. Recovering the meaning of Christmas is something that we must do for ourselves. I will acknowledge and celebrate all of the aspects of Christmas. On Christmas Eve I will gather with my brothers and sisters in the faith to sing our favorite Christmas hymns, to watch the children place the figures in the manger scene, and I will join with Christians all over the world in offering prayer and praise to the one born in the manger, Jesus. But then I will go home to sit before our tree, and perhaps fall asleep with visions of sugar plums dancing in my head as I listen for sleigh bells and the sound of tiny hooves on the roof.

“Happy Christmas to all, and to all goodnight.”

Read Full Post »

A Christmas Carol

One of my favorite television ads repeats every weekday morning on the cable news outlet. By repeat, I mean repeat. The station plays the brief ad back-to-back, sometimes three times in succession. I can only guess that there is some contractual arrangement committing the station to play the ad a specified number of times per hour – the only way to reach the goal being to double up. Whatever the reason, every morning a lawyer appears, in a dapper suit and a cowboy hat. He implores us to contact him if we have taken any number of common prescription drugs or received implants and have suffered any of a bewildering array of side effects or have died. It’s the “died” part that I particularly enjoy. I imagine a dim wraith with outstretched skeletal fingers floating in his office negotiating fees while gleefully contemplating a cash settlement.

Perhaps my imagination was fueled this morning by a late night of watching Jim Carrey’s performance in Disney’s A Christmas Carol, or possibly, “a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.” As Ebenezer Scrooge reminds Marley’s ghost, the senses are notoriously sensitive to little things, and a “slight disorder makes them cheats.” So it is with imagination. That of course is the whole point of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. This novella, written in haste and published in 1843, remains one of his most widely read novels and one of the Western world’s most beloved Christmas stories, but it is not a children’s story with jolly, fat Santas and eight, tiny reindeer. Ebenezer Scrooge is as successful in deluding himself as he is in money-changing. Although he would hotly defend his view of the world as the only rational approach to life in a harsh and competitive society – that the poor had better die and “reduce the surplus population” – Scrooge lives in an imaginary world where money and going about the business of business rule. The poor are poor through lack of ambition and effort. The wealthy are such because of their diligence and their unshakable commitment to the principle that we all get what we deserve. Unfortunately for Scrooge, his three spirit-visitors show him clearly what he deserves. It is not what he imagined.

Dickens’ social criticism and commitment to just treatment of the poor is understandable in light of his childhood experiences. His father, mother, and younger siblings were placed in debtors’ prison while he was forced at age twelve to work under harsh conditions in a blacking warehouse. Many of the his notable characters and his encyclopedic knowledge of the London poor come from this period and make their way into A Christmas Carol. An imaginative story, full of quirky, colorful characters, becomes a vehicle for exposing the ways in which western society renders the uncomfortable, the dirty and uneducated invisible, preferring an imaginary world of fairness and justice.

Jacob Marley’s chains are Ebenezer Scrooge’s chains, as yet unperceived by Scrooge, although as the story progresses, it is clear that everyone else can clearly see them. It is only Scrooge himself who is blind to what he has become and oblivious to the weight of accumulated guilt he has amassed through years of selfish disregard for others. The past and the present provide Scrooge with a picture of who he is. In conversation with the first two spirits, he comes to understand not only who and what he has become, but he is forced to confront what he has lost in the process. It is the third spirit, however, that is most terrifying – terrifying in appearance, terrifying in imperiousness, and terrifying in silence. He alone utters not a word.

We can and must continue in conversation with ourselves. In the quiet moments and secluded places of our minds, both past and present intrude, often in noisy, confused voices that if listened to, never fail to offer ample evidence of who we are – either, as the Apostle Paul reminds us, accusing or excusing us. It is through this conversation that Scrooge begins to understand who he really is, and it is through this same conversation that our eyes may be opened to see more clearly who we are and what our legacy will be. But it is the final ghost, the Ghost of Christmas Future, who most affects Scrooge. Though the past may haunt us, it is fixed, immovable. The future, however, is a great, dark unknown, shapeless and silent as a wraith. Scrooge can have no conversation with the “not yet”; he can only follow the pointing of its skeletal fingers. Ebenezer Scrooge learns in the end that the future is indeed dependent on the past, but unlike the past, it is not fixed. The future is still open to alternative endings.

This Christmas, what future would you choose? The word scrooge has entered our language, describing not only a miserly person, but also one who is bitter, angry, and humorless to boot. Jacob Marley’s return from the dead is only a story, but millions throughout the ages have believed and trusted that Jesus did return from the dead with a quite different message – one that not only banishes the darkness from the future but stands as a sharp corrective to the bitterness and anger of the world. Embrace this message this Christmas, and declare, if only for season, that there is another way, that neither the present nor the future need follow on the past. Paul tells us in his letter to the Corinthians, “And now these three remain: faith hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” Abiding in these three promises a different outcome – a different outcome for you and for those around you. That is the miracle of love and the miracle of Christmas. It begins with each one of us.

 

Father, mother, daughter, son

Each a treasure be

One candle’s light dispels the night

Now our eyes can see
Burning brighter than the sun

God bless us everyone

A miracle has just begun

God bless us everyone*

*God Bless Us Everyone, by Glen Ballard and Alan Silvestri, sung by Andrea Bocelli, in Walt Disney’s A Christmas Carol

Read Full Post »