It has been an embarassingly long time since I posted, but I have just only begun to start reaching for my footing after the madhouse that was Christmas.  Now that we are into the season after Epiphany, it seems appropriate that we might want to talk about what we’ve just done–and what it means for the future.

I love Christmas.  However, the theologian that resides in the back-right part of my brain finds that notion repulsive.  Co-opted and commercial.  Christmas is to Christianity what American Idol is to music–too saccharine and in too great a volume, too unhealthy.  Not to mention, just hacktastic.  As one of my mentors once said, “We do it backward: we celebrate Christmas the night before and Easter the morning after: it ought to be the other way around.”  And don’t get me started about “the Christmas spirit” and celebrating the twelve days before Christmas as if they were the twelve days of Christmas.

And yet, I do love Christmas.  I think I inherited it from my Dad.  There’s nothing like generosity to make a person feel whole.

This year was different for us.  We were away from what has historically meant “home” and are living in a new frontier.  The Rector left for his “home” on the 26th and for a few days, our world was a little too quiet.  This isn’t to suggest that I wanted craziness–we had how many memorial services Thanksgiving weekend?–but the absence of family on Christmas was palpable.  My in-laws came for several days after Christmas and through New Year’s, which relieved some of that pressure.  But all of the football we watched made Christmas–all 12 days of it–seem a bit mundane.  Each day of Christmas was transformed into a generic Saturday in the fall.

In all, it was a different Christmas.  And I kind of liked it.  This doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t prefer to see my parents and my sister and her family on Christmas or to spend the holidays with my closest friends.  That’s always better.  But despite the craziness and homesickness and all of the ridiculousness that follows Christmas around like a puppy dog, Rose and I were forced to confront the fact that we did move hundreds of miles from “home”.  Together.  That whatever the sickeningly sappy Christmas memories we have before 2009, we were forced to be the new “home”.  That this Christmas would be the one we remember years from now because it was the one that changed everything.  It truly did. We had to recast this holiday that is so synonymous with unchanging tradition as a new, emerging holiday, so entirely dependent on who participates and what each makes of it.  We went to church Christmas morning, distributed Meals on Wheels, picked up Large Diet Cokes from Hardee’s (it was open!), and headed to a friend’s house to relax and share Christmas Dinner.  We didn’t get home until 10 at night, putting our overly-tired toddler to bed before collapsing into bed ourselves.  And it actually felt really good.  I felt content–if only for one day.  I didn’t need all of the other stuff that I had come to associate with Christmas.

The truth that comes from all of those silly Christmas stories with which we are bombarded the entire month of December, replacing the shows we actually like to watch, attempts to corral our brains around some  version of happiness that is so ill-defined that it can be found in finding someone’s shoes or even by engorging a Grinch’s heart.  And throwing Christianity at this ill-defined idea in hopes that the rest of us would spontaneously say–“oh, I get it, it really is all about Jesus!” only muddies the definition all the more.  But here’s the rub–here’ the thing that the Christmas Spirit attempts to capture and the CHRISTmas Mafia seems to forget about: joy.  Being joyful.  Feeling love, sharing love, and being loved.  Not in any particular order, but in circulation.  Sharing the love that you receive.  That’s joy.  That’s what we sing as we leave the nave on Christmas morning (or the night before) in the form of “Joy to the World!”

For as scroogey as Rose and I felt going into Christmas, I can’t help but think that Christmas 2009 was a serious game-changer.  And isn’t that what Christmas and the Incarnation is supposed to be about?