Fast first, then feast: how God keeps Christmas - virtues of feasting

Commonweal, Dec 19, 1997 by Sara Maitland

On the whole, all this is a good thing - I have no sentimental hankerings. But it does mean that I never fast and so I don't know how to feast: and at Christmas time I sense something missing. Feasting is about excess, extravagance, abundance. Feasting is public, celebratory, and inclusive. (It is also necessarily hard work - many of us buy plastic Christmas trees because we are too idle to vacuum up a few fallen pine needles.)

We have come to think it is rather vulgar to eat until we are bloated; to give gifts so extravagant that they put us into debt; to stuff children with candy until they are sick; to get roaring drunk, wear silly hats, and sing loud songs whose words we cannot quite remember. And because we cannot do it ourselves, we tend to despise feasting itself. I have some friends who keep to the tradition of placing a tapped beer barrel in their front garden over Christmas-tide, free for all. Last year the local clergy came and asked them to stop because people swilling beer upset those leaving midnight Mass.

Instead of feasting we go in for "spirituality." Instead of extravagance, we talk about being "less materialistic" - at Christmas for heaven's sake. The wise men brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh: much is made of the theological and spiritual symbolism of these gifts, little of the crude fact that they are very expensive. God does not seem to mind materialism in a good cause.

But God, apparently, loves feasting. Nothing secretive or peaceful about it. A brash new star, exotic foreigners, ecstatic shepherds, choirs of angels - not just a quiet messenger, but hosts of them, pouting through the night sky singing "Glory." God chose to celebrate this feast "just at the worst time of the year," to be a light in the darkness, to comfort us on our lonely road, to prove over and over again that the things of the world are good, that fun is an ethical concept. Perhaps this is what is meant by "blessed are the poor" - they know how to feast.

I wish I were able to feast with this extravagant host. I am appalled by my pusillanimous responses: by the minginess of my imagination. I tend to criticize the menu ("virgin birth - so out of date") and carp at the behavior of less refined guests ("oh, not 'Hark-the Herald' again"). I wear jeans not my wedding garment, and I want the children to "calm down" and not wake up too early in the morning.

Of course they should wake up early, of course they should be overexcited, of course they should run amok and tear open their presents with greedy zeal. This is the feast day of a God who so delights in matter, in the stuff of the universe, in bodies, that he plunges into it all head first, and becomes a child. This is the feast day of a God who rips the invisible membrane between time and eternity so heaven floods the world, in an extravagant and abundant tide of love, and the world laps back, carried undiluted to the everlasting banquet. The feast of a God who comes into the cold, the dark, the silence of our prosperity and says, "Let's party."