Wrangler Dani

I’ve been hearing a lot this season about how hard the holidays can be. I’m no stranger to this lament, I remember my own long Decembers of endless Advent, in which I skulked into back pews and cried my way through joyful carols. I remember yearning so desperately for a different kind of Christmas, for little chubby hands to help me roll out Christmas cookies, for more wonder at the extravagant generosity of this holiday than I felt my heart could give.

But I also took solace in the ghostliness of Christmas, the fact that old Ebeneezer tosses Christmas away for decades before he ever keeps it well. I remember singing “…O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel; that mourns in lonely exile here…” and “for unto us a child is born… and the government will be upon his shoulders…” all in one service and feeling the weight of such a push and pull. This is the tension of Christmas – that we yearn for redemption while knowing we won’t experience it fully this side of heaven, that our ransom has been paid but that our reality is still broken, captive, waiting.

I’m no theologian, but it seems to me that when we lament pain at Christmas, when we tell each other that this season is particularly hard to walk when our days look more like a forced journey than a sparkly holiday jaunt, when death and doubt creep in, we are missing the point. Because Christmas is deep and powerful in its obscurity, its pain, its lack of completion. Christmas is not about handsome big-city lawyers coming home to a small town to learn the meaning of Christmas in the company of an adorable baker with a Labradoodle and a cast of quirky townspeople (not that I’ve ever watched a movie like that… ahem.). It’s not about the Lexus in the driveway or the iconic movie images of ice skating at Rockefeller Center or getting engaged or having a baby or reuniting with your loving and never frustrating family.

Christmas is the unfinished story of an oppressed people who hoped without reason for centuries. It’s about living under tyranny, poverty, insecurity. It’s about God with us – in our brokenness and our pain and our petty fights and our overpacked schedules and our private grief. It’s about joy to the world, even though the world can hardly snatch  fleeting happiness, let alone repeat the sounding joy. It’s a cry for peace when we don’t know what Peace on Earth even means. It’s a call to “fall on our knees; hear the angel voices” despite our rational minds telling us not to, that such things can’t be, that we bow to no one.

Last year, we were exhausted and worn thin from an emotional adoption, slowly adjusting to life as a family of four with a sleepless newborn. Five years ago, I sat on the floor and listened to Amy Grant sing my childhood favorites, wishing every well-worn tune didn’t leave me aching, that hope wasn’t so costly. Four years ago, I stood in my kitchen, potholder still on my hand, holding the phone, breathless, while tears rolled down my cheeks – my dear friend’s mom was abruptly gone, and we had no guide for this kind of loss. This year, for people I love, this month is brimming with pain and uncertainty, there is death looming and regret closing in and desires unfulfilled and I know, I know, that this pain is oh-so-real.

I’m thinking about all of this, because, in stark contrast, this Christmas is one of the happiest I can remember in our household. This year, we have a precocious little girl who sings Jingle Bells and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen (I know, she’s a prodigy) at the top of her lungs and charms even the most harried of store clerks out of candy canes with her big toothy smile. We have a Tarzan of a toddler boy who barrels through life with utter abandon and bears a striking resemblance to Linus Van Pelt, I keep telling Adam he’s going to recite Luke 2 any minute.

We ate brunch downtown last weekend and did some Christmas shopping, and walked back to the truck with wrapped gifts and bags in tow, our rosy-cheeked girl and babbling boy making each other laugh. It was Hallmark-movie perfect – small town, big scarves, cheery babies, handsome husband – but like our well-worn carols, it’s more beautiful because of what came before, because we have not always had this family, this hope, this peace. Christmas is powerful because it lands in the middle of our mess, because it is grounded in loss, in injustice, in expectation.

I guess the point I’m trying to get at is this – if you feel that your Christmas isn’t beautiful because it isn’t particularly joyful, if you feel lonely, or broke, or stressed, or filled with so much unrealized hope that you fear your heart will fossilize within it – take courage. This is the story of Christmas. Christmas is for the broken-hearted, for the long-awaited, for those who cry out for rescue from an unjust world. Christmas is about joy and generosity, hope and peace, love and justice, precisely because those things are so hard to find. Every December, the nights are long and cold, and we hang twinkle lights and give gifts and light candles to remember that darkness makes its play but it doesn’t win. Christmas reminds us that it never will.