If we wanted, we could talk about the news today; as always there is plenty of it. It turns out that a GOP congresswoman from Texas who hasn’t shown up to work since July is actually in an assisted living facility (the ____ goes both ways); Biden commuted 37 of 40 federal death sentences on Monday (time for the annual debate about the death penalty); and Donald Trump keeps assuring us that Elon Musk is not about to be the president, and the liberal media keeps assuring us that he’s lying.
But all of this feels irreverent this week. If there’s a time for tuning out the news, as important as the day-to-day interactions of the world may seem, it’s this time when we gather with family and friends to celebrate the birth of our Savior. (READ MORE: The Christmas Cross to Bear)
So, this newsletter is not going to talk about the news.
If you really want to know what’s going on in the world, refer to my dedicated colleague Dan Flynn’s morning missives. We’re going to talk about Christmas trees, caroling, and cookies and about what it means to be jolly and what (and yes this is an ambitious claim) the greatest philosopher of the 20th century G.K. Chesterton had to say about it all.
In one of his weekly columns, published shortly after the Christmas feast, Chesterton observed the following:
Fortunately, however, being happy is not so important as having a jolly time. Philosophers are happy; saints have a jolly time. The important thing in life is not to keep a steady system of pleasure and composure (which can be done quite well by hardening one’s heart or thickening one’s head), but to keep alive in oneself the immortal power of astonishment and laughter, and a kind of young reverence. This is why religion always insists on special days like Christmas, while philosophy always tends to despise them. Religion is interested not in whether a man is happy, but whether he is still alive, whether he can still react in a normal way to new things, whether he blinks in a blinding light or laughs when he is tickled. That is the best of Christmas, that it is a startling and disturbing happiness; it is an uncomfortable comfort. The Christmas customs destroy the human habits. And while customs are generally unselfish, habits are nearly always selfish. The object of a religious festival is, as I have said, to find out if a happy man is still alive. A man can smile when he is dead. Composure, resignation, and the most exquisite good manners are, so to speak, the strong points of corpses. There is only one way in which you can test his real vitality, and that is by a special festival. Explode crackers in his ear, and see if he jumps. Prick him with holly, and see if he feels it. If not, he is dead, or, as he would put it, is “living the higher life.”
I apologize that this quote is so very long, however, I’d highly recommend reading it two or even three times. I’m not sure why I thought I could follow that up with commentary, but here’s my weak attempt.
The more I think about it, the more I become convinced that this is one of those things the modern world tends to get totally wrong about Christmas. It should be clarified that, by modern world, I don’t mean the degenerates trying to reshape our culture into something unrecognizable. No, I’m talking about the modern Christian world; about you and about me.
Every year there are a large number of articles from Christian news sources urging us all to “Keep Christ in Christmas.” This past weekend, I went caroling with my parish choir outside another Catholic Church, and the outdoor nativity scene we stood by was emblazoned with that same message (the parish is in the midst of Ohio State housing, to be perfectly fair, so it’s probably warranted). (READ MORE: The Best Christmas Movies of All Time)
But, as I stood caroling outside in the 28-degree weather, it occurred to me that keeping Christ in Christmas might not be the entire problem — after all, Silent Night is the most covered song of all time with some 26,000 different versions of it on Spotify. Even the modern agnostic recognizes that Christmas originates with the story of a baby born on a winter’s night in Bethlehem. The issue is that, once we’ve put Christ in Christmas, we tend to be merely happy about it, rather than uproariously jolly.
We’ve formed a habit at some point in our adult lives, of practicing a kind of stoicism about Christmas. We smile around the dinner table, attend a Christmas service or mass (the most convenient one for our purposes), and stop for a few moments to contemplate the babe in the manger, but it doesn’t surprise us that the babe is there. This feast day, after all, is a commemoration of a historical event that actually took place. The holiday comes once a year. Of course, the child is in the manger.
But it should surprise us. It should make our hearts feel full and our chests ache with delight. It should inspire an uncontrollable joy that manifests itself in uproarious laughter, a couple of pranks, a voice too loud for comfort, a few too many hugs and kisses, and a carol sung outside a neighbor’s house decidedly out-of-key and accompanied by a surplus of cookies. When we sing “Joy to the world,” this is the kind of joy we mean. Not a superficial joy, but an obnoxious and uncomfortable joy. (READ MORE: Why It’s a Wonderful Life Is the Greatest Christmas Movie Ever)
There should be so much joy that Dec. 25 doesn’t suffice to contain it all. It should spill into the days following. There’s a reason tradition calls for 12 days of Christmas, and that an older tradition mandated the celebrations last until Feb. 2.
All of this to say, don’t just have a Merry Christmas, have a jolly good Christmas filled with laughter and delight. Allow yourself to be surprised by the gifts, the babe, the tree, the cookies, the carols, and the new year. Let your heart be full and your eyes be bright. If you can do that, you will have kept the season the way it ought to be kept.
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