Christmas crept up slowly…
…but then rather exploded in our house. Like a sparkler it seemed to take a whole lot of effort and time to get lit, although the anticipation and the first sacred sparks were bliss.
And once it was going it shimmered and dazzled and fizzed, but its brilliance was concentrated by its brevity – because we always knew it could only burn for so long.
So we held it out in the dark willing it to last longer though we knew it couldn’t.
And we stared into the heart of it.
Through the fir branches into the tiny lights. Past the chatter to the shining eyes. Beyond the piles of food to the simple blessing of time to share it. And in the busy laziness of TV, inexplicable board games and digging through the Quality Street (cos no-one likes the golden ones, do they?) we had a sense that we each belonged and were loved. Even when we were grumpy cos the game made no sense.
But maybe that was not your Christmas?
Maybe you were the kid whose sparkler didn’t light, who was left standing with a dumb cold metal stick in the drizzle. Left wondering why there was no magic in it after all.
After all the work and preparation. After all the shopping and the cooking and the wrapping.
Why, after all, the stockings and the manger are empty.
Maybe your Christmas ended up being in hospital. Or maybe your little sister died one week before Christmas and now nothing makes sense because you still want to be happy but you can’t because she’s not there. And I’m sure heaven’s great and all… but wouldn’t here have been even nicer? With the tree and the food and the present you bought her. And the Quality Street. Cos you’d happily spend an eternity eating only the yucky golden ones if it meant you could have her back to share the others.
Then you hear the song that plays on every station at Christmas. It ends, full of passion, with the line ‘…the Christmas we get we deserve.’ And you see the adverts and the pictures of other people’s perfect Christmases.
We all need to hear this:
No-one gets what they deserve. Not at Christmas, not any time.
We did nothing to deserve our blessings and you, absolutely, did not deserve your troubles. The shiny people we were all watching and envying on TV did nothing to deserve their apparent success, just as the homeless people on the Salvation Army adverts certainly do not deserve their destitution.
Right now, happy or sad, blessed or broken, in the darkest days of the year, the season offers nothing so banal that it can earned or deserved. There is no formula – no quick fix. And the hard things will still be hard. But at Christmas you have permission to breathe, imagine, to remember forwards. To dream, deep in your own self, of goodness, un-earned acceptance.
I don’t know what you believe. I have enough trouble figuring out what I believe at times. But I am sure of this…
At the heart of Christmas is an incarnation.
A wrapping-in-warm-flesh of the intangible, of a dream. I’m very aware that it can all come across as terribly naïve but there are times when the most powerful stance you can take is a stubborn, unsophisticated naïveté that things will change, that in the wreckage and pain there is a possibility of peace.
That maybe we are not such hopeless cases after all.
So hold on to that sparkler. I believe it will blaze – I don’t know for how long, but it will be blindingly beautiful.
And, just for a moment, it will shatter the darkness.
* The song is ‘I believe in Father Christmas‘, written & produced by Greg Lake & Peter Sinfield. It’s a very good song. No criticism is intended by picking on its closing line.
Don Lowe 