Merry Christmas

The crisp cold air that surrounded the house had no bearing on the excitement and smiles that my two boys had 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 that 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 once again through the eyes of your own children.  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 the eyes of our kids 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 actually get.

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

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

I think more than anything 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 does this all powerful God not have a face, or name.  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 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 now a days.  Perfect bodies.  Perfect children.  Perfect spouses.  Perfect family members.  Perfect societies.  Perfect Christmas settings.

No longer can we tolerate limitations whether that be our own or in others.  And yet, there 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.