There's just no denying that Christmas is the official season of busy. You don't even have to talk about gratuitous shopping and buying, decorating and travel plans. Just adding the special events to the monthly calendar will make you sigh like a mountain climber who reaches a false summit, only to realize that the real summit is still a lot of distance and work away.
And of course, there are our expectations. We carry expectations of enjoying old memories, creating new ones and being with family and friends. And all this of course with the prerequisite assumption that everyone gets along. Because it's Christmas, we somehow build the expectation that everything will be as we hope and imagine, just like when we opened presents as children years ago. Somehow back then, even our mild disappointments faded pretty quickly under the avalanche of excitement and play and food.
I still remember my train set Christmas. The whole thing was a simple two track oval. It was tacked onto a piece of plywood by a neighbor, so that the whole thing could be moved in and out of our small house easily. It was a steam engine replica and the best part was that it came with a little vile of goo that you could squeeze into the engine to make the thing smoke as it ran. I watched it go around that oval for hours. I stopped it; I started it, and I made up countless stories of work being done, people traveling places and of everything on the way to everywhere. Although that was a peak in a lot of ways, I don't remember any of my Christmases from childhood through my teenage years as being very much less.
If you've lived long enough past your "young" years, you've probably found that Christmas and it's denouement New Years are also bittersweet. It's the season to be particularly pained by family dysfunction, estrangement from loved ones and the more frequent bringing to mind of those who are no longer present at the table of this life and are truly missed.
Tiny Tim in Dickens' "Christmas Carol" had a couple of these Christmas complicating issues. Tim Cratchit's family was very poor and Tiny Tim's health was failing. Circumstances could have been better for the Cratchits in many ways. Even so, Tim was down right giddy at Christmas time. It seems that his vision of Christmas didn't involve regrets of summits not reached.
Seems like his family got caught up in his enthusiasm too. One portion of that was probably to humor and encourage Tim, but I think it was pretty hard to stay dour around that kid. Even an eave's dropping Scrooge couldn't help but get sucked in.
Tiny Tim is a fictional ideal but I don't think he lives too far down the street from reality. We don't meet him and his kind often because we're not willing to travel with our own Christmas ghosts. We're not willing to look honestly at our past, beyond the veneer of our present and into the possibilities of our future. Usually, we blink and say "No thank you." The Ghosts' gift to Scrooge was this: Honesty. The ghosts and all they reveal represent an invitation to Scrooge to abandon his chains...These were chains he was forging for himself in this life. They were of the same kind that Marley was doomed by his own self-deception to carry throughout eternity. All Scrooge had to do was say yes to the reality the ghosts offered and refuse to blink.
Happiness and completeness were not delivered by Scrooge's wealth nor discouraged by Tim's disease. For Tim, they existed independently of circumstance. Despite the fact that real happiness looks wonderful from the outside (and it is), it isn't easily acheived. Next time you watch or read about Tim et al, watch how many times Scrooge flinches, how much the revelation costs him. This is no self help whiz bang achieved by a mantra of activity with a dash of will power on the side. This is expensive. This is the offering unto death of Scrooge's identity, of all that he is. It is both risky and costly.
The gift that anyone can give to everyone is the gift of themselves. Note however, this gift costs everything. To give ourselves doesn't involve more doing, more buying or more busy, even if that's all undertaken in the name of doing for others. The gift is accepting who your are with all your brokenness and all your faults, honestly. The gift is offering to others the same grace that accepting yourself requires. This is the gift that Christ delivered in his person, at his birth. It's true that Christ paid the cost of the gift in full. But it's also equally true that the lives he bought must be lived through and with him or they remain forever chained and incomplete.
So...Merry Christmas. Christ's gift to us by his birth was the real and soaring truth contained in that fictional line: "God bless us, every one." We are blessed beyond all possible circumstance both now and forever. We need only the living exposure to the truth that was offered to Scrooge by the Ghosts of Christmas. In other language, the Ghosts are character metaphors for the truth and value of what Christ brought into this world with his birth and offered to us in his death and resurrection.
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