“It ruined Christmas for me,” my friend used to say of a long ago and very sad event in her life. It had happened right before Christmas, and not only was Christmas sad the year it happened, she made sure it was sad every year, for decades, afterwards. Sharing Christmas sorrow with all around became her mission in life. Oh, she’d show up, a gloomy presence, at Christmas parties, and soon enough you’d hear her telling some unsuspecting guest about that Christmas past that ruined every Christmas present – and was sure to ruin every Christmas yet to come.
The thing is, though, you can’t ruin Christmas. You can misunderstand it. You can choose misery over joy, but you can’t ruin it. My gloomy friend could not ruin Christmas, as much as she tried, any more than Ebenezer Scrooge could ruin Bob Cratchit’s Christmas, as much as he tried.
It was never hard for me to resist my friend’s attempts to ruin Christmas. I like Christmas in its many manifestations. I can get picky about the historical and biblical accuracy of those Christmas card scenes with a star over the very European stable and the Three (!) Wisemen there on bended knee. I tend to think “not so” when we sing about no crying the little Lord Jesus made. But I don’t need to let it ruin my Christmas.
I would prefer sturdy boundaries between secular Christmas with its “ho, ho, ho” and Christian Christmas with its “Glory to God in the Highest,” but as sappy and even wrong as those depictions of Santa at the manger may be, I don’t need to let them ruin my Christmas.
Now, in one sense Christmas is all about us – “Unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior…” Christmas is about our salvation. As we say in the Creed, “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven; he became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made human.” But in other ways it is not about us at all. It is not about whether we were naughty or nice (we were naughty) or whether we are Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female.
More profoundly, Christmas is about God, how in the fulness of time God took on human flesh and became God with us, the infinite becoming finite, the all-powerful becoming weak, the King becoming a slave, light submitting to darkness, life willing to die.
No one and no thing – not my gloomy friend, not sad memories, not tyrants nor despots, not poverty nor wealth, not sickness nor health, not my selfish ways – can ruin Christmas. Christmas is about what God has done, and we cannot undo it.
And so, as Tiny Tim said, “A Merry Christmas to us all; God bless us, everyone!”