Christmas and its Discontents

I had been irritable recently because I worked so much around Christmas. Time with my family and friends have been in such short supply recently, and I had so little during the holidays.

My dissatisfaction made me more sensitive to the general unhappiness of this season. The quiet discontentedness of people I see in my office in December is overwhelming. One patient put it bluntly: “Christmas is depressing.”

This unhappiness is not due to the materialism that ads try to sell each holiday. Not one of my miserable patients was obsessed with presents or possessions. It is the wholesome things about Christmas that create the misery: the peace, joy, and family happiness. None of these things happen much in real people's lives.

Against this shinny myth of merriness real holidays seem so ugly. Modern Christmas is a microcosm of our American Dream: an expectation that harmony and happiness will always be our natural state. As a result we are miserable when we discover that our own lives and families fall short of our expectations. Materialism never destroyed the wholesome holidays. Ravenous buying is the degrading way we seek consolation once we realize the “perfect Christmas” we hoped for was a lie.

If we expected Christmas to be merry it is because we misunderstood the celebration. Christ was born because we are always so far away from hope and wholeness. Even the most jolly of families hides flaws, cruelty, and contradiction. These blemishes are most obvious when we try to manufacture a joyful occasion. Christ was born on Christmas day to save us from ourselves. We should rejoice because he came. We rejoice because He died for us, not because we imagine our lives or families to be anything worth celebrating in themselves.

Death & Christmas

This is a poem I wrote in Haiti after watching a newborn baby (the one in the picture) die. I hope it doesn't lessen your joy of Christmas, but perhaps deepen joy with a perspective we all need: the understanding that our hope was bought with a price.

The Incarnation

Why did I ever come forth from the womb to look on trouble and sorrow, so that my days have been spent in shame? -Jeremiah 20:18

Unto us a child is born
Unto us a son is given.
Born of blood,
Born to bleed.
Born into the cold
Born into squalor
Among the filth of animal feces
On the coldest night of the year
Night air carries distant moaning,
The bitter moaning of death vigils.
Many die on such a night.

...and the bloody infant
Miserable yellow jaundice.
Wrap the infant tight,
Lay him shivering in the hay
To be bitten by lice and fleas
And bored through by parasites.
He whines and writhes,
Vomits, then shakes in quiet agony
But the child will not die tonight...

He will live to know more agony
The suffering life of a dirty peasant,
Building with broken hands.
Born of suffering,
Born to suffer.
And pitiful, muffled cries draw
Men of the fields,
ugly and reeking,
Bringing infection to the infant.
Unto us a sickly child is born,
Unto him the plague is given
And the infection of us all
Will be upon his shoulders.
But the wretched one will not die tonight...

He will live to know more agony
To die tormented and alone,
Rather than here in his mother’s arms.
Brought to life this night
Brought to life to die.
In the wretchedness
Of this yellow, shivering body:
Here is the only hope
Of peace and salvation.

Unto us a sickly infant is born.
Through suffering hope is born.
And the weight of the world
Will be upon his shoulders.
And Death will be upon his shoulders
Tremble before your newborn Savior.

…and the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.


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Buy Nothing Day!

Happy Buy Nothing Day! In response to the mass buying frenzy that happens starting today (an unfortunate manipulation of the traditional thankfulness and giving associated with these holidays) today is declared "Buy Nothing Day" (a holiday that Congress would never dare officialize). So today we remember our humanity and fight the ways that we are defined as and depended on by society to be "consumers." We also reflect on how our own greed and materialism makes us complicit in this sad spectacle.

Perhaps with enough reflection we can realize that the gift of Christ on Christmas would be less honored by unrestrained buying of things that people don't need, but by giving to those we love by serving those whose need is deepest.


PS: Perhaps I should clarify the preachy tone of this blog, by pointing out I am not some monk or Daniel in Babylon who is not soiled by such things. My own guilt in this love of things makes me need a day like this more than anyone.

Christmas Gifts

I got what looked like a catalog in the mail the other day. I was about to throw it away with the rest of the junk mail, when I noticed it wasn't quite the "gift catalog" it seemed. Instead of smiling models it was full pictures of ragged children in the third world. The cover advertised it as "gifts for the person who has everything." The catalog was full of gifts to those in need that you can give as a gift to someone you love. The gifts included such much-needed things as goats, blankets, immunizations, pre-natal care for poor people.

It must have caught me at particularly awkward time, because I began to cry right there on my porch. I had come home from work tired and grumpy. Recently my life of isolation has mostly been alternating numbness and self-absorption. The looming chore of Christmas shopping was a only a joyless burden on our strained finances. Now my beloved niece and nephew who have plenty of toys will be getting wheelchairs for disabled kids in the third world for Christmas. Giving such gifts to those who have nothing is a wonderful way to break us out of the materialistic stupor into which we so easily fall.

Much thanks to World Vision for reminding me that the gift we are celebrating is Christ, the birth of redemption and unconditional love into our sad world. Why do I so easily forget Christ?

You can see the catalog here: www.worldvisiongifts.org