Let the revels begin - meaning of Christmas revels - Living by the Word - Column

Christian Century, Dec 11, 1996 by Gracia Grindal

Though I do not have children of my own, I have a niece and three nephews for whom Christmas is still riveting and marvelous. Our family marks the countdown to it with Advent calendars. The intense and unimaginable waiting has nothing to do with the longing and waiting for the end of the world. This waiting is for stuff, for presents which will briefly assuage a longing that we eventually come to understand can never be assuaged, a longing for something beyond what commercial gifts can offer.

Before we can open the gifts, of course, we have to listen to the Christmas gospel, sing and pray, then wash and put away the dishes from a meal of almost saturnalian proportions. The agony of waiting is intense and almost unendurable. But Grandma has ruled on this, and that is the way it is.

So we hear the Good News as if for the first time, and our hearts are filled with joy because the Savior came to us as well as to the shepherds in Bethlehem. Then we open presents, each person from the youngest to the oldest, one at a time, so we can exclaim on one present before moving on to the next. Giftgiving is joyful and charged with energy because it is in the right proportion. We hear the Good News, rejoice and then receive things from those who love and cherish us, even if they never remember that taupe is not your favorite color and that you hate chocolate.

We all have some distaste for excesses of the season, and so we pray to get to the real meaning. Some traditions, with very good reason, do not celebrate Christmas. Even the most devoted admirer of the church year will have to admit that the festival was created by those who thought the church should take over the pagan winter festivals of light. The temptation to shun the material world runs strong in all of us, from those who decide not to exchange Christmas presents and teach their children to give rather than receive, to those who do their best not to hear or sing Christmas carols during the Advent season because it ruins Christmas. In my Norwegian Lutheran pietist tradition, Santa Claus was verboten. What was important was the Christ child.

We knew this well and believed it, but it didn't keep us from celebrating. For 12 days we visited relatives, sang, ate, played duets in the parlors and built snowmen outside in the fierce cold. I remember traditional party games, including the old pagan Norwegian tradition of jule-bukking. We would disguise ourselves, then visit homes, where the hosts were required to feed us, then guess who we were.

The sermons on missing the real meaning of Christmas were important. We understood them to be necessary, but they did not hinder us in reveling in the good things of God's creation. At Christmas, after all, we celebrated that our Lord had taken on flesh and chosen to enter into the worldly pleasures of life. His coming in the stable to the poorest was not a way to avoid entering into the created order. He came to the poor so that they too could be filled with good things and take pleasure in what they had been given, in Christ and in his creation.

The Christian tradition at its best has always taught that the things of this world can and should be enjoyed as gifts from God so long as they do not become ends in themselves. It is the proportion and relationship to the goods that makes the difference.

The old masters understood this when they painted the Magi worshiping the Christ child. The heads of the rich, mighty sages are almost always below the head of the Christ child as they worship him with gold, frankincense and myrrh. To worship him is to be subject to him, no matter how great one's own station in life.

Christmas has spread around the world, to places where few have heard or believe that the one who came at Christmas is the Savior of the world. Is it not possible that in lands where the gospel has rarely been heard, rushing Christmas shoppers might be stopped by this story of so long ago? All by itself it tells exactly what God was about in the incarnation and in our lives. Life here on earth can be good; even in the midst of terrible suffering, deep joy can fill us as we give thanks for the mercies of God and the simple gifts of love we receive from others. The stories we love to hear and tell at this time of year, from "A Christmas Carol" to the "Littlest Angel," teach that the true meaning of Christmas is the love we receive from each other because of God's first love for us in Christ Jesus.

After the presents are opened and the children put in bed, with the Christmas music playing in the background, the older generation sits down to coffee, Christmas cookies and talk. The complicated exuberance and irritations of kin bubble around us. For the moment, however, we let them be, and rejoice because once again God's incarnation among us has freed us to enjoy this moment, this celebration. We know this because God extravagantly revealed it to the simplest of all folks in the meanest of all places, when simple shepherds rejoiced to kneel before a babe lying in a manger. Let the revels begin!