What are the little things that make it Christmas for you? What has shaped your perceptions of Christmas – of what it’s supposed to be? Likely, it’s a combination of your personal experiences and the ways the holiday has been presented to you by your culture growing up – what was on tv or the radio, what commercials or movies you remember, what foods your grandmother made.
For me it’s watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and A Christmas Story. My dad on the roof putting up the lights, getting a real Christmas tree, singing carols, the little plastic Santa that sat on our front porch all lit up from within, getting dark early, the smell of cigarettes and taste of lemon bars and fudge at my grandma’s house where we had our annual Christmas Eve party. A well decorated shopping mall with way too many people. These things make it feel like Christmas to me.
I love the movie Christmas Vacation. I watch it every year. This year our middle child was finally old enough to watch it: A rite of passage in our family. Actually, to say I love Christmas Vacation is sort of irrelevant. Love is beside the point: It’s a part of how I experience Christmas. I saw it in the theater in December of 1989 with my family. I was 10 years old. I have seen it at least once nearly every year since then. It’s not Christmas until the lights on the Griswold’s house blind the neighbors. This movie has shaped my very perception of what Christmas is supposed to be. How could it not?
At the end of the movie, the main character – Clark Griswold – who has been subjected to a string of comic errors, mishaps, misunderstandings, fires, pratfalls, indoor squirrels, and complicated family relationships – stands on his front lawn gazing wistfully into the Christmas night sky and says to himself with no small sense of satisfaction, “I did it.” And you get what he means: He means he made it happen, he made Christmas work, he made it what it should be: Clark set out to have what he called a good old-fashioned family Christmas, and he did just that. He accomplished Christmas. I did it he says, and it’s a perfect ending.
And also, no he didn’t. He didn’t do it. He didn’t accomplish Christmas. If anything Christmas happened to him.
Why am I nitpicking a 36 year-old holiday movie? Because I’m noticing how the mentality of Christmas as something I need to accomplish – something I need to get right – has permeated my consciousness. I bought into it. Which of course is not Clark Griswold’s fault. This mentality has been around long before 1989. But each year I notice the ratcheting up of expectations and what seems like an obsession in our time with the sheer busyness of the season. It takes on a sort of marathon mentality: The goal seems mostly to reach the end intact and be able to point backwards to prove you did it: You accomplished Christmas.
Then each year, I actually sit down and read the story of Jesus’ birth.
In so doing, I find it is overwhelmingly a story about what God does, not what we do. The most detailed version of the nativity of Jesus is also the most well-known: It is found in Luke’s Gospel account. Every aspect of this story points to what God is doing, not to what humans have done. No human accomplishes the first Christmas. Not even Mary and Joseph – though we know Mary does a mighty thing that night. But the story is framed as she and Joseph experiencing something God is doing.
Mary is a magnificent person to follow in the Gospel story of Jesus’ birth. She displays an innate understanding that the events occurring around her – and even within her – are not her accomplishment, nor are they accomplishments of powerful men. Rather she sees clearly that God is at work, God is delivering. And God’s deliverance is something that is happening to us and through us – but not because of us, not by our power.
Even the virgin birth – which I know some people have a hard time with – is about God more than anything. It’s not about moral purity and all that nonsense: It’s about the idea that this thing that is happening is happening fully by the power of God. The job of the humans is to recognize God’s presence and activity, and to say yes to it. That’s about it. We don’t make Christmas happen. We allow Christmas to happen to us and through us.
There is a moment in the Exodus story where Moses and the Israelites are standing at the edge of the Red Sea and all of Pharaoh’s army is bearing down on them in hot pursuit. They have no clear way to either defend themselves or to escape. It is then that Moses speaks up, saying to them, “Do not be afraid, stand firm, and see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians whom you see today you shall never see again. The Lord will fight for you and you have only to keep still.” It is at this moment that the seas part and the people are delivered to safety, as the Pharaoh and his army are undone, washed away by the tide.
This is the deliverance of Israel from bondage. That word, deliverance, is the translation of Jesus’ very name. Jesus is our deliverance. Christmas is about him. It’s about what he has done and is doing. Christmas is our deliverance. And we do not accomplish our own deliverance. We do not make Christmas, it makes us. We have only to keep still and pay attention.
God needs nothing from me. It is entirely the other way around. which I mostly know but either forget or live in denial of it much of the time.
What if I believed that I need Christmas rather than Christmas needing me? How would that change my experience of this season? If I believed that Christmas makes me who I am instead of me making Christmas what it is, how might that shape me differently? This season is not about me, about what I make happen, about what I accomplish. And this is a great gift. I am being delivered even from my own busyness and expectations, from my own need to prove myself and think I did it. Moses and Mary and Joseph and Jesus and my father and my grandmother, and all the saints are standing with me at the edge of the season and I have nothing to fear, I have only to keep still and see the love. God is not elsewhere.
