I’m not for one moment advocating no sweet treats over Christmas (I know for many people, these are a highlight of this time of year), but I do long for a saccharine-free Christmas. So often in our society, we paint this time of year with a falsely sentimental hue which veers into self-indulgence, exaggeration and unreality… and then get upset when reality hits and it does not conform to this picture. I have a particular loathing for the line in ‘Away In A Manger’ which declares ‘But little Lord Jesus, no crying He makes‘, because it is blatantly untrue: if Jesus took on human flesh and came as a baby, He most definitely did cry, because all babies do! To suggest otherwise is to place unreal burdens on all parents coping with the cries of their babies and to implant the wrong notion in our heads that in the Incarnation, Jesus did not really know what it is to be human. He was most certainly a ‘special baby’, but I doubt that stopped Him crying (or being sick or filling a nappy…)
As we prepare in our family for the arrival of a baby, I am struck once again by how reality differs so much from this saccharine, sentimental idea of the Christmas story. Giving birth is a messy, painful, laborious and undignified job. Yes, we rejoice over the birth of a child, but giving birth in a stable in an over-crowded city with no clean sheets and no previous experience of childbirth must have been terrifying for Mary and Joseph. Quite how we have moved from this to the notion of a ‘perfect Christmas’, with family members sitting happily around a table stuffed full of food and being wittily amusing for hours on end, baffles me!
The problem with our ideas of a ‘perfect Christmas’ is that it lays unnecessary burdens on our shoulders. Jesus had harsh words for the Pharisees who ‘tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.‘ (Matt 23:4) Don’t let anyone, least of all yourself, put heavy, cumbersome loads on your shoulder’s about the perfect Christmas. It really doesn’t matter if the turkey is dry or the sprouts soggy or the Christmas pud more like leather than the moist, succulent pictures you see in your cookery book. Families will have arguments on Christmas Day like any other day: this is not the end of the world. We can still love, forgive, move on and cope with imperfection. It’s easier to do so if we accept reality as it is instead of trying to stuff it full of unreal expectations, like Clark Griswald in ‘National Lampoon Christmas Vacation.’
The truth of the Incarnation is that God became ‘one of us’: ‘the same blood, the same flesh – one of us/ the same skin, the same breath – one of us/ The same dust and dirt, the same trials and hurts – one of us.’ (‘The Name of Emmanuel’, Matt Redman) If we grasp hold of this truth, we will have a blessed Christmas, for it’s all about God with us – one of us – and not about anything else we imagine it to be. As long as God is with us, we will be fine.