By Alex Florez
I haven’t always loved Christmas. In spite of my mom’s heroic efforts to make it a special time of year, Christmas used to smell less like sugar and spice and more like angsty teen spirit.
It was the time of year when my father’s absence was most conspicuous and the holiday when my mom‘s boyfriend made rock stars look like altar boys in comparison. One year, I even had such hellish hallucinations that I landed in the ER on Christmas Eve. Instead of cookies and milk, I got a CAT scan and a spinal tap. I was really starting to think Christmas did more harm than good.
But when I was eighteen, I discovered my new roommate’s borderline-psychotic affinity for Christmas. For example, he got absolutely giddy when the grocery store uncrated their annual egg nog supply. He became a veritable embodiment of “Joy to the World,” and it was totally contagious.
With him around, it’s impossible not to recognize the special nature of Christmas—even now in our 40s. Of course, his ebullient joy during the holiday season doesn’t make the hard things in life go away; his candy cane colored glasses don’t magically transform the world into a balcony view of the Caribbean. And he certainly isn’t manufacturing some species of counterfeit contentment to dampen the harsh realities of the world; he is neither deflecting nor denying.
The reason I find his Christmas enthusiasm so irresistible is that he’s not concealing the parts of life he finds undesirable; rather, he’s responding to the part of his life that he finds undeniable: the love of our Lord, Jesus.
After all, the greatest news the world had known to that point was that “Today in the city of David a Savior was born for you, who is the Messiah, the Lord” (Luke 2:11), and the newborn King was about to change everything.
The gatherings, the lights, the songs, the presents, the sounds and smells of Christmas memorialize a history-bending miracle: that Jesus came to set prisoners free by forging relationships with them right here in the grit and grime of the human experience.
And of course, each person enters the world through birth, which is precisely where we encounter Jesus in our observation of the Christmas holiday. Remembering his birth as a real human experience forces us to take it out of the category of fairy tale or contrived mythology. If the nativity scene in Luke is just quaint folklore, then the spirit of the season can lie dormant the rest of the year—abstract and anodyne. But if a virgin really gave birth to the Word of God who became flesh, then we ought to throw parties all year long; there should be no end to our ecstatic celebration of the God-Man, Jesus.
So raise your nog, blind your neighbors with a thousand strands of lights, sing carols at the top of your lungs. The commemoration of the birth of Jesus is worth it and a hundred trillion times more.
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