So too with the whole of Christmas; under the crisp edges of wrapping paper and ribbon we have a confident sense that it's about unity and love and family and togetherness and things like that. Good things, things that made us happy as a child. But it's not so much the exact specifics of the gift that excite us, a large part is in the unknown. Christmas is indefinable, but its one nonnegotiable is that it is good.
And as with a gift, there is a layer of unrelated 'decoration' that needs to be removed before we hold the gift with any certainty. Under the feeling and traditions of Christmas, there is a single, definite object, an event. The substance of Christmas is the birth of Jesus.
Now there have been enough plays, sermons, stories, books, articles and even television shows using the phrase "the true meaning of Christmas" that most of us should be on the same page by now. Even if your primary excitement about the Holiday Season is the decorations, carols, gifts, cards, food, family, and feeling – if pushed you probably could correctly answer what the actual 'gift' of Christmas is under all that wrapping paper. This is the second layer, the specific gift.
When Christmas day finally comes and you get to tear into that mysterious green and red package, you soon know exactly what you have been given. There it is, sitting in front of you - a book. Now you know for certain what the gift is and isn't. It is a book. It could have been a dvd or box of knives, but it isn't. You were excited before opening it because in not knowing the exact contents you could enjoy the excitement of all your collective imaginings.
Before you opened it, before you knew, it was theoretically perfect, exactly what you wanted, thoughtful, expensive and tasteful. But now you know what it is, and sure, it's some of those things, but now it's limited to simply being one ordinary reality, a book, just one.
For some people, the historical reality of Jesus birth is this let down. The 'true facts of Christmas' in no way compare to the beauty and magic of generic 'holiday spirit' and warm feelings. It's more accurate to know the gift/event behind the decoration, but in some sense all it does is weigh us down to a reality of limits.
But there is yet a third way to take all of this in. There is a kind of Christmas present that surpasses the ambiguous hype. Every so often, a Christmas comes around where you may be given a gift like this, one that you weren't necessarily expecting, but it changes your life. It is a present of such value and beauty that you treasure it, it is helpful and functional to the point that it infiltrates your every day.
It's the kind of gift that long after the wrapping paper has been bundled and thrown away it still sits prominently in your life. You use it on boxing day, and every day up until the new year, on through January and February and Autumn. You come back to it again and again. It is indispensable, invaluable, irreplaceable. Of course before you unwrapped it you had thought that perhaps it might be quite a decent beach chair, or overnight bag, but the crisp and persistent reality is that is far better than those things, completely beyond your imagining.
A gift like this is when you know that the single event under all the Christmas hype is in fact life changing. The reality of Christmas is an infiltration of a divine being into our world, on a tireless rescue mission fuelled by immeasurable love. It is God Himself becoming an infant through selfless humility to wash our feet and die our death. Christmas is the night sky filled with the rapture of glorious angels singing the triumphant praises of the God who pursues His people. This season is the snatching of guilty souls from an eternal prison and instating them on thrones in a perfect, eternal, pure kingdom of blinding light and deafening joy.
The actual meaning and significance of Christmas leaves the vague niceties of an unknown holiday far behind. We don't celebrate miscellaneous festivities or a retail store gifts. Christmas is so much bigger than merely a general sense of good-will to all mankind, it is the redemption of mankind.
It is the remembrance that as the heaven-born Prince of Peace lays His glory by, He is born that man no more may die and with the herald angels we too sing "glory to the newborn King!"
Sam Manchester is currently a theology student with an inescapable sociology degree behind him. In an attempt to reconcile the two, he reflects and writes about their coalescence in everyday life.
Sam's archive of articles may be viewed at
www.pressserviceinternational.org/sam-manchester.html