Merry Christmas

The crisp, cold air surrounding the house had no bearing on my two boys’ excitement and smiles as they paced the hallway at the top of my parent’s stairs.  The same hallway that I once paced, waiting for my father to give us the go-ahead to stumble dangerously down the stairs in haste to attack the presents waiting for us under the tree.  The same butterflies in our stomachs.   The same unknowing.  The same anticipation that gave birth to uncontrollable smiles.  It is and was the heart-wrenching surprise and expectation of it all.

It is Christmas morning.  Christmas through the eyes of my two young boys.

Then, there comes that moment.  That moment of reality slowly creeps over the faces of the boys when they realize that their presents have run out.  When they scurry through the wrapping paper, wondering if they missed anything, you can’t help but sense the anxiety of “now what” coming over their faces.  The same anxiety that I had at their age.

There is something truly magical when you experience things in life again through your own children’s eyes.  Maybe nothing more so than Christmas.  Yet the older I get, what strikes me most about Christmas is that moment of “Now what?”.

Watching this feeling through our kids’ eyes, we see them dealing with the reality of limitation, both theirs and others.  We see the anxiety of looking around and no longer seeing the picture-perfect tree with beautifully wrapped presents and instead seeing a room that looks like a bomb had gone off with the excitement seemingly sucked up out of the chimney as fast as it “supposedly” came in the night before.  We see the exposing of expectations of what they wanted and maybe what they thought they deserved to what they got.

As adults, we often look at these moments and see them as “teachable,” not realizing that we are doing the same thing, not so much with presents as with our relationships.

We get angry when others don’t live up to our ideals.  We get annoyed when others show limitations to what they can handle in social situations.  We get aggravated when people ruin the picture-perfect Christmas expectations that we had envisioned in our heads.  In other words, we are not much different than our kids the minute they open their last gift.

This year, the term “Merry Christmas” has struck me most. What paradox and explosiveness in that perceived sentimental statement.

Christmas is the specific time when Christians believe God came crashing into existence.  It is when ideals and expectations and every other human limitation could be felt by the One who created all of us.  Let that one sink in for a lifetime and more.

In other words, no longer is this all-powerful God, face and nameless.  No longer can we project what we want God to be.  There He is, coming into the world not in a picture-perfect setting with everyone sitting around a fireplace singing Christmas carols and drinking egg nog, but in a dark, cold, smelly place, where no one but a few journeymen from the East and “low life Shepherds” would recognize Him.   (Btw, not that there is anything wrong with the fireplace scene, so as long as we allow room for our own and others “issues” to be present as well).

We expect perfection nowadays.  Perfect bodies.  Perfect children.  Perfect spouses.  Perfect family members.  Perfect societies.  Perfect Christmas settings.

We can no longer tolerate limitations, whether that be our own or in others.  And yet, on that first Christmas, the One who created everything, including all of us, not only became one of us but did so as a child.  A child wrapped in clothes who was put in the hands of a human being to be fully taken care of…therefore experiencing total vulnerability, total dependence, and complete limitation.

Now, that is a reason to have a Merry Christmas.