Christmas Day as Judgement Day

To write of Christmas after December 25^th is neither a sin nor a crime, but there is something untoward in my tardiness. We meet the overdue Christmas missive with the same misgiving we reserve for the rooftop that twinkles through February. Even small children know—however much they may deny it—that the Christmas season cheers because it only lasts a season. The magical must be momentary. Thus we treat Christmas lights that last too long and Christmas tales that come too late with the same ill humor we greet a joke repeated one time too often. We do not smile on those who try to prolong a mood past its moment.

This essay risks pushing the holiday past its healthful limits. My excuse is only that it began as a series of tweets published on Christmas itself. My tweets auto-delete: if their message is to be preserved, they must be published here after Christmas Day.

The thesis I preserve is simple: the Christmas season is a sort of measuring stick. What is good in bourgeois civilization is concentrated in this season of beauty and merriment. Against this bar all creeds, all claimed paths to excellence, all cults of eudaimonia, may be measured. Against this bar most are found wanting.

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When I recall Christmases of my childhood past, it is never the gifts that spring to mind. Do not mistake me: I certainly received enough of them. One year my parents gave me a quiver of arrows and a bow to shoot them from with. Another year I received a child-sized telescope. The Gameboy that ate away my summer vacations and spring breaks must have been a Christmas gift. Yet I struggle to recall exactly which year I received any of these presents. I do not remember unwrapping any of them. So it is with all my gifts—the sole exception being the extraordinary Christmas morn where my siblings and I discovered a live puppy playing before our Christmas tree.

Lodged in my Christmas memories are not gifts, but deeds.

Christmas is both a general season and a particular day. Some families make Christmas Day the big event; others focus their festivities on the Eve. We always lazed our way through Christmas Day: parents napped as presents were played with, somewhere between 10:00 and 2:00 we would stumble together for a late breakfast (pancakes, French toast, or crepes), and perhaps that night we would go see a movie in theaters. I never much liked that last tradition—it seemed to go against the spirit of the holiday. For us that spirit culminated on Christmas Eve.

These Eves came in two types: those celebrated with my grandparents, and those held at home. The latter grew more common as I grew older. My father’s career matured with his children. Each move up the corporate ladder meant relocating one state further away from my cousins. These cousins multiply: As of 2023 my maternal grandparents claim some nineteen grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren to their name. When you add in-laws and step-children to the mix, any gathering of this clan is a fifty person affair.

My grandmother would begin preparing for the Yuletide muster two months before hand. Garlands went up; wreaths were hung; great wooden nutcrackers would appear in every room of the house; even the normal cutlery would be changed out for special Christmas themed china kept in storage all months but December. The decorations I saw as a young child were not so elaborate—this winter wonderland accrued over the decades. How it accrued! Were my grandmother not so neat and orderly I would label her a Christmas hoarder: the last time I counted she owned twelve Christmas trees and sixty-two Father Christmas figurines.

As children we did not appreciate the extraordinary labors that go into transforming a home into a Christmas village. We were much more excited about what my grandfather did to make Christmas Eve special: around 8:00 he would stride into the family room to the sound of sleigh bells, the spitting image of one of grandma’s figurines. Portly in all the right places, my grandfather makes a convincing Santa. All grandchildren six and under were fooled by his performance. It was not every family that had Santa Claus visit their home on Christmas Eve—but whenever we celebrated Christmas with the family clan, we were some of the lucky few!

My mother never attempted to compete with her mother’s elaborate decorating scheme. She has never owned more than one tree. Half of its decorations were made by her children as grade school art projects. The Christmas Eves held in front of this tree never swelled to my grandmother’s fifty person standard, but they too grew larger as time rushed forward. Our home was open to those who had none. Those who could not journey to their own families, or who had no families to journey to, joined ours. Most came from church: the widower with no children, the single mother who would otherwise struggle to finance a Christmas feast, medical residents obligated to work shifts of Christmas day, the two young missionaries assigned to labor in our congregation. I remember a comment made by friend of mine, a child of Hindu parents who never celebrated Christmas in her own home, not long after joining in these festivities: “I do not understand—it is as if this warm glow washes right over me the minute I step over the threshold. I do not know what this feeling is, only that I have not felt it before.”

Mine were goodly parents: I happily give all credit for such feelings to them. My singular contribution to our Christmas traditions was a talent show. Where this idea came from I cannot recall: but once I happened on the notion I did not let go of it until I had forced it on every soul who joined our holiday. My rules were ironclad: On Christmas every person must demonstrate a talent, produce a craft, or find some other way to display a feat they performed this year. I slipped out in the middle of our inaugural show, dressed myself up as best I could as an Artic wanderer, and left out the front door. Through the Minnesota snows I trudged to the backyard, dramatically opened the glass door separating warm living room from freezing patio, and launched immediately into “The Cremation of Sam McGee” in my best attempt at what I imagined was a Yukon accent.

The season began well before Christmas Eve. My mother complied a 2,000 song Christmas playlist on iTunes (for the younger folks, that means she had to buy all that music). It began blaring the day after Thanksgiving. We reserved one night every December to drive around town in search of the most beautiful light display. Each year there was a flurry of Christmas themed performances, recitals, concerts to attend: this week we might listen to a bell choir performing “Carol of the Bells” and “O Come, O Come Emmaneul;” next week it might be a girls choir singing “I Wonder as I Wander.” The community playhouse might be putting on a Christmas themed rendition of Little Women; a local congregation, their annual Christmas pageant. On the first Sunday night of every December we would travel to the church house to listen to the First Presidency’s Christmas devotional. That was a worldwide broadcast; our local congregations were just as determined to glory in the Christmas spirit. For four weeks every hymn sung on Sunday would be a carol, every sermon Christmas themed. A week or two before Christmas our church youth group would go about a-caroling, or putting together gift packages for soldiers far from home.

The ward—Mormon lingo for “congregation”—that I attended as a teenager outdid itself. Every year they hosted a very special exhibition: hundreds of Nativity sets, borrowed from homes and congregations across Southeastern Minnesota, were put on display. These sets hailed from every clime: hundreds of little Marys and Josephs, here carved as Polynesian islanders, there formed from Chinese porcelain, were placed around the church. The capstone of this exhibition was a live action Nativity scene with members of the congregation dressed up as all the principal characters. I did two hour-long shifts, first playing a shepherd, then a wise man.

One memorable Christmastime my fingers froze over. You must understand: there are mornings when the Minnesota air grows so frigid that every breath stabs the lungs like a thousand tiny knives. Feet quiver; hands numb up inside their gloves. On one such morning I was tasked with loading the back of the family minivan with bags of beans, cans of corn, and sundry other staples. My mother led our congregation’s welfare arm: it was her calling to visit families most in need, discover what those needs may be, and disperse to them these necessities. This was a yearlong charge: hunger does not only occur at Christmas time. Several times a year we would load up at the church storehouse; several times a year we would unload our wares at a half dozen homes among the flock. As her only son, I was my mother’s muscle. This task was not new to me—but there was something particularly affecting about performing this task at Christmas time. The sacrifice was slightly greater, of course: any act of service demands a bit more of you when the thermometer reads -20 below. But the reward was also greater: there is a special warmth in knowing that your labors, however small, helped save someone else’s Christmas. Inner warmth battled outer cold. The Christmas spirit won that battle.

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It took me many years to fully appreciate any of this. As a child I viewed the 2,000 Christmas songs and sixty-two Father Christmas figurines as evidence that my family was a bit freakish. I rolled my eyes at decorations and caroling. It seemed like we all had a little too much Christmas in our lives.

My outlook began to shift when I left home. I was sent to Boston as a missionary. There I came to know the cold and hard-bitten creature known as the New Englander. New Englanders are fast and faithful friends, but their friends are few. They do not take kindly to guests or strangers; they stand out from their fellow Americans by their stubborn refusal to smile or say “good day” to those they pass on the street. It was a hard place to be a missionary—most of the year. Christmas time was different. I was astonished how attitudes transformed the day the lights went up. Those who would normally cross the street to avoid a missionary were suddenly opening up their hearts and their homes to their influence. Perhaps there was something magical in this holiday after all.

There is nothing magical about Christmas in East Asia. They do celebrate Christmas in Taiwan, Japan, and mainland China. Many stores and urban centers hang lights; shops certainly put up Christmas displays. Friends will get together for a Christmas hot-pot. But it is a hollow holiday. There is no holly, nor any ivy; no one lights candles that smell of cinnamon or freshly cut pine; there are no overly excited children zooming about, nor grandparents tit-tutting them to stay patient for a few more days; there is no warmth, no tenderness, no tight embraces. Christmas as practiced in the East boils down to a second Valentine’s Day—an excuse for trend-obssessed girlfriends to badger their boyfriends into buying them a trendy gift (or taking them to a trendy Love Hotel). My advice to all tempted to condemn American Christmas traditions as crass or commercialized is to first spend a Christmas in the Far East.

My time in Asia caused me to reflect often—as one might expect, for about a month once every year—on what makes the Christmas season the way it is. Christmas is full of small and simple things. There is nothing daring or brave in my childhood Christmas stories. All grand causes and crusades stand far removed from Christmas puppies and talent shows. Nothing in my Christmas past embodies justice or even wisdom; these were not moments of transcendence or enlightenment. But it is difficult for me—nay, it is impossible for me—to wade through this stream of memories without concluding that these were moments where I met the good. I do not reach this conclusion through any chain of logic or philosophy. My conviction comes simply from my own experience. I might as well deny the cold felt in a Minnesota winter, or the love felt in my wife’s embrace.

If the word “goodness” means anything at all, I found some portion of it in the merry days of Christmas time.

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Ours is an uneasy age. Bourgeois civilization is reviled from diverse angles. Capitalism, colonialism, liberalism, feminism—there is no shortage of “isms” corrupting all of modern life. Intellectuals always have an enemy ism to needle. Their favored cures are as drastic as their favored ills are broad. Some argue we must role back the enlightenment, others the marketplace, a rare few Christianity itself. All live in thralldom to imaginary worlds more just or more excellent than their own.

Against these imaginaries I martial a set of images. They are modest and familiar: twinkling lights and flickering fireplaces, Frank Capra and Charles Dickens, rooms dressed with garlands and holly, roasted platters traded for warm embraces, teenagers signing carols around the family piano, children acting out the nativity scene in the family living room, little toddlers too excited too far past their bedtime, a young man trudging through the snow to deliver cans of corn and bags of beans to families not his own.

Christmas is a metric, a judgement. It is silly and sentimental, a thoroughly domesticated holiday, in practice a celebration of the most bourgeois aspects of life: private happiness, familial bliss, childhood as a privileged category, contentment derived from creature comforts, joy derived from things given and received, and charity as the guiding virtue—but charity practiced soul-to-soul, not at the level of society as a whole. It is not a holiday that celebrates justice, nor greatness, nor ambition; it is mirthful but never Dionysian; it is faithful but never austere. It sits uneasy with the ethos of the conqueror; it fits no better in the theorizing of the philosopher. No Greek nor Roman, no crusader nor hermit, no revolutionary, no terrorist, no underground man can smile sound on this Victorian relic.

This holiday does not idolize excellence. It gives equally to the old, the poor, and the ugly. It does not ask for supreme sacrifices. It does challenge those who celebrate it to recognize the supreme sacrifice of another—but to recognize this sacrifice in an everyday way, through modest and moderate acts of goodwill. It is a celebration well made for the temperate. It defines success as sitting around a warm fireplace, kids in tow. It draws meaning from nostalgia and merriment, in small rituals and small acts of kindness. Christmas is a bundle of unapologetically mawkish sensibilities gone wild—and despite all of that, it is good.

I am aware that the Christmas I describe is not universal. I describe a tradition whose practices emerged in the mid-1800s, and that have lasted, with an aesthetic tweak there or a practical change there, down to the present. It embodies the virtues of its origins: it is a holiday for the shopkeepers, birthed by the Victorian marriage of Christian sentiments and Enlightenment sensibilities. From that moment arose a set of traditions and convictions that are modest, beautiful, and good. They are small. They are simple. But from these small and simple things great ones may be judged.

You may suppose that this is foolishness in me. But this is my metric. The Christmas season is a standard and a measure. It stands in silent judgement, merrily dividing good from ill. To evaluate some radical critique of our society, I first turn here. What would this critic do with Christmas?

Very often, little more needs be asked.

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If you found this post worth reading, you might find some of my other essays on meaning and culture worth your time. The essays “Questing for Transcendence” and “Thoughts on Post Liberalism” are especially relevant to this piece. To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar’s Stage, you can join the Scholar’s Stage Substack mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. Your support makes this blog possible.

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