The
first part of this essay by Joseph Bottum speaks of elegantly decorated homes
pictured in House Beautiful and the perfect advent church services. I begin quoting several paragraphs down:
Give me
the vulgarity of inflated reindeer, bobbing out on the lawn. Give me trees
drooping under the weight of their ornaments. Give me snow piled to the
rafters, the dozen crèches my wife scatters wildly around our home, like
breadcrumbs leading back through the woods. Give me houses so lit up that the
neighbors dream at night of sunstroke. Fruit cakes so dense they threaten to
develop their own black-hole event horizons. Gingerbread cottages and Mouse
King nutcrackers and wreaths on every door and silly Christmas cards and eggnog
so nutmegged that the schoolchildren carolers cough and sputter as they try
manfully to gulp it down.
Tastefulness
is just small-mindedness, pretending to be art. And Christmas isn’t tasteful,
isn’t simple, isn’t clean, isn’t elegant. Give me the tacky and the exuberant
and the wild, to represent the impossibly boisterous fact that God has intruded in this
world. Give me churches thick with incense and green with pine-tree boughs, the
approach to the altar that feels like running an obstacle course through the
poinsettias, and a roar from the bell towers so ground-shaking that not even
the deaf can sleep in. A follower once asked St. Francis—oh, so
prissily—whether it was licit to eat meat on the Feast of Christmas, and he
shouted in reply, “On a day like this, even the walls eat meat.
And if they cannot, then let them be spread with meat.” Now there’s a picture
that won’t make House Beautiful any
time soon: the walls of the dining room dripping with smeared meat. Such an
image will not be subsumed by any attempt to tidy up the holiday and make
Christmas manageable. St. Francis points toward something about the wonder and
the mess of the Incarnation: the shattering of ordinary life that the Nativity
declares. The smash of predictability, the breaking of attempts at elegant
organization. This world is out of our control—not just in the bad sense of sin
and fallen nature, but also in the impossibly good sense that God, in his
providence, has taken it in hand.
In other
words, embrace the madness of the season. Bellow out the off-key carols. Smile
at the silly reindeer. Empty your pockets into the Salvation Army kettles as
the Santas ring their bells. Slip on icy walks with your arms full of presents.
Load the tree with lights. Pray not in
despair or supplication but in wild thankfulness.
I have a friend whose outrage at the
commercialized falsity of modern Christmas has led him to turn his back on much
of the way the culture celebrates the season. A deep believer—a young mystic
who has chosen to live his life very simply—he goes out every December to find
a small branch, a fallen leafless stick, for Christmas. He stands it up in a
pot on his table, decorates it with a handmade ornament or two, and sets a
paper star on top. One year, he added a few pieces of popcorn strung on a
thread, but I think he thought them a disruption, for they were gone the next
Christmas.
This
friend is probably a better Christian than I am, and he’s certainly a better
man. It’s the hard center of the holiday that he wants not to be distracted
from. He loves the discipline
of Advent, because the
Church’s prayerful run-up to Christmas focuses his thoughts and prayers on the great gift of that holy time: on God’s
descending in the flesh, on the Blessed Virgin’s assent to the celestial
purpose, and on the beginning and the end of things, the Alpha and the Omega
that is Christ. He tries to ignore, as best he can, the overblown, overexcited
cheapening of Christmas in the loud blare of the season, since it only makes
him sad—or angry, or crazy, or depressed, or something; distracted, at any
rate—to see that fundamental moment, when the divine appeared in human form,
smothered under layers of phony “Happy Holidays!” cheer.
And it’s
true that I envy, in many ways, the intentionally minimal, prayerful life my
friend lives. For that matter, his Christmas reaction—his angry distaste for
the snake oil of the commercialized season—is surely intelligible, deeply
considered, and strongly felt. I know just what he means.
I also
know that he’s dead wrong. My friend shares something that’s present in the
elegant, tastefully secular version of the holiday so beloved by upscale
magazines, for they both betray a dislike of the vulgarity and impropriety of
the culture’s celebration.
But
surely the point is that Christmas will never be tame (as C.S. Lewis might have put it).
God can turn even secularized reindeer and snowflake decorations to his
purpose. To reject them is to miss some of the ways in which the modern holiday
follows the pattern of a messy Medieval festival. It’s to miss, for that
matter, some of the ways in which human beings respond to the rich, abundant
experience of God. When we see the busy sidewalks—when we’re buffeted by the
shoppers hurrying past the tricked-up Christmas decorations on the
storefronts—we shouldn’t imagine we’re watching people who are smothering the
impulse of religion. These are ordinary folk, trying to celebrate the season.
They sometimes falter, as we all do, and they’re often confused, as we all are.
But they nonetheless grasp in a profound way that a real thing comes toward us
in December, and they layer it over with whatever fake or genuine finery they
can find—not to hide it but to honor it.
Besides, if you
set yourself against the season, you’re not going to win. So why not simply be
pleased about it all? Smear the walls with meat—carne, the root of incarnation—if that’s what it takes. Break out into
song, if you can. Break out into sentimentality, if you can stand it. Break out
into extravagance and vulgarity and the gimcrack Christmas doodads and the
branches breaking under the weight of their ornaments. Break out into charity
and goodwill. But however you do it, just break out. What other response could
we have to the joyous news of the Nativity that God has broken in, smashing the ordinary world by
descending in the flesh?
