The Magnificence of Christmas
The days of millions of people are filled with humdrum, monotonicity, and familiarity. We go about our business because we must: it pays the bills, fulfills certain expectations, and sates some wants, and what leisure we get anaesthetizes rather enlivens. We think economically—about ourselves, our families, our homes, and our fellows. There are exchange costs, returns on investment, the management of time and resources. The making and spending of money is like respiration: so long as it goes on, we remain alive; and yet with no respite, we are also deadened by our time on the treadmill.
Acedia (ἀκηδία) is the word earlier times and traditions had for the condition this way of being invited. The word stands for a sort of spiritual and emotional torpor, restlessness and disengagement with duty, and apathy for the virtues. The German philosopher and theologian Josef Pieper wrote in his short book In Tune with the World that, “To celebrate a festival means: to live out, for some special occasion and in an uncommon manner, the universal assent to the world as a whole.” Christmas is uncommon: it is magnificent—it implies loftiness of mind, generosity, and grandeur. A festival of this kind may be among the most potent elixirs we have in combating despair, and “the universal assent to the world as a whole” means that we can come to a joyful and affirmative acceptance of the goodness of creation in its entirety. To celebrate the goodness of creation means breaking with our economical and pragmatic regard for others. In so doing, we come to understand ourselves and our fellows as something more. They can no longer be as Dickens has Scrooge describe them in A Christmas Carol: “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” Even in Kantian terms, in treating one another as ends rather than means, there can be no surplus population. This is reflected in Goethe’s line from Torquato Tasso, “If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.” In Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, he writes that, “To love someone means to see them as God intended them to be,” and in Tolstoy’s Resurrection he writes that, “The only way to know people is to love them.”
At the outset of December, with long lines and long lists of gifts to buy, decorating to be done, church services attended, and cookies baked—the sheer scope of the obligations necessary for creating this mirthful ambience, feels burdensome. The work required hardly seems to inspire the high-minded connections with one another described above, but we should permit ourselves a pause.
Let us fill the wintry stillness with some inspiration. Revisit the nativity story in Matthew and Luke, listen to Handel’s Messiah. Read Dickens’ Christmas Carol or Clement C. Moore’s The Night Before Christmas together as a family. Read Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl, Washington Irving’s Old Christmas, Louisa May Alcott’s A Christmas Dream, or O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi. Allow yourself to fall into the spirit of the season, and invite and entice your children into something profoundly humanizing. Listen, truly listen, as a family with no distractions, to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio or Saint-Saëns’ Oratorio de Noël. Listen to Bruno Pelletier’s Minuet Chrétien, the Vienna Boys’ Choir sing Stille Nacht, or Luciano Pavarotti’s Adestes Fideles.
Be together. Look at Giotto di Bondone’s Nativity from 1304 or John Singer Sargent’s Carol Singers from 1910. What has remained constant across centuries? For that matter, consider Coca-Cola’s Santa Claus as originally painted by Haddon Sundblom in the 1930s and Norman Rockwell’s covers for the Saturday Evening Post. We can bemoan the commercialism of the holiday, but its efficacy was ultimately predicated on a yearning for better selves and better relations in all of us.
We see this through films. Whether it’s in the quiet resignation of George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, or Bill Murray’s zany, climatic conclusion at the end of Scrooged. Our sentimentality should not be dismissed in watching movies like The Bishop’s Wife, Christmas in Connecticut, White Christmas, Miracle on 34th Street, Holiday Inn, or even National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation or Elf. We can discard them for being lowbrow or kitschy, or insufficiently reverent, but each of them resonates because they are from us, about us, and reflect us.
The films, the music, the art, the stories—they all invite us to transcend the ordinariness of our lives this season. To live fuller, to experience more deeply, to reflect, and be with one another in ways that deepen our faiths, restore our connections, heighten our sense of generosity and charity, stoke and fire our sense of imagination. We are more alive for all of this, and we have a rich cultural storehouse to draw from for inspiration.
So, fight the dark tide. With this time, bake, string the lights, put up the tree, put out the decorations, light the candles, sing the songs, play the music (and really hear it)—listen to the choir sing; put down your work, play on the floor with the children, go ice skating, drive through lit up neighborhoods, build a snowman, and make snow angels in the lawn. Wrap your presents, buy a poinsettia, put on the Christmas movies, cozy up with a cup of hot chocolate and a stack of books you have read a dozen times before. Drink cider, and eggnog, hot toddies and stout, laugh with friends, exchange gifts, light incense, put the cookies out, and hang the stockings with care. Somewhere in the midst of this, preparations cease to be preparations for the next thing and become instead a participation in this thing – participation in the present.
We will find that the things we have given do not matter so much as the good will we have shown, the mirthful spirit in which we have shared our time, the hugs and laughing, and the bread we have broken. That a holiday exists that calls us to peace, to pause, to behave charitably towards one another in a celebratory rather than an obligatory way—it is in this that we realize the gift and magnificence of Christmas.
D. Anderson
Headmaster
