WHAT DOES CHRISTMAS CONSIDER OF YOU?

(Post by: Madie Hobbs) Blogmas Day Three 2024

Have you ever thought of Christmas as a sort of living and breathing thing? As a sort of thing which takes its time waking up, and which looks around the world with sleepy eyes, only to realize with a jolt that once again it has its work quite cut out for it?

I must confess, I never had until after last Christmas when I was talking with a couple of friends about the endurance of Christmas. I do not mean simply the holiday itself, or the day of December 25^th. I mean the feeling of it. The electricity. The magic.

Christmas can feel a little like falling in love, if you hold it just right.

Like love, Christmas must be pursued with undying passion. The older I get the more convinced of this I become. Any good love has you bursting at the seams with this giddy anticipation to create happiness and magic in the life of the person you love, and you commit yourself undyingly to fulfilling their every request.

When you are young, Christmas loves you unconditionally. As you get older, though, it expects a little more pursuit on your end. It pulls back a little and beckons you to step forward and fill the space. It asks you to give it just as much of your magic in being alive, and breathing, and created to glorify the Divine, as it gives to you of its magic. For without these things where does the magic really lie?

How often do we pursue it though?

Understand me when I refer to Christmas in this way. It is not a meaningless holiday full of silly traditions that mean little to the survival and expansion of civilization. What it celebrates is the greatest love story across all the distant ages of history. It celebrates the purest form of humanity in remembrance of the One who willingly self-sacrificed for people who may never love Him back.

A passage I find particularly fitting for how I view Christmas, comes from the Two Towers, a book I took from to also begin my first Blogmas post of last season. In this scene, Tolkien is describing a character called Treebeard, who is a tall old Ent, the wisest of the trees, who is coming to realize that though he wishes to avoid the perils of Middle Earth, they have not ignored him. When one of the other characters looks up into the face of this old tree, covered in wrinkles between his bark, and bushy eyebrows, and a mouth through which comes the deepest and slowest of voices he has ever heard, this is what he says when looking up into Treebeard’s eyes:

“One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present; like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but it felt as if something that grew in the ground – asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same low care it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.”

What would happen if we knew that we not only got the privilege of examining Christmas, but that it was considering us just as deeply, and looking for a heart fit to fill? Searching for longing which matched its own. Waiting with bated breath to see if you keep the same fondness in your heart it has for you.

You see, if we understood that Christmas is not simply a day, or a season, or a playlist, or a film, but rather a feeling akin to falling in love, would we not live better? Would we not keep it better?

What if we understood that Christmas is its own being, a time in which a Savior who loves us far better than we will ever love Him once again becomes incarnate? Would we stare into the wide eyes of Christmas and let it see a similar gleam to its own?

In imagining this I imagine Christmas as this age-old thing, with features resembling those of everyone I love best. I see deep blue eyes and long lashes, maybe a little scar here and there that makes it look tough, and a mouth curved into the slightest of smirks, concealing whether it approves of me or not.

Our tendency is to look at Christmas as something which always has been and always will be, and which requires very little of us. But rest assured, Christmas is waking up. It is looking at you for its definition. It is asking you to take a little step forward and love it like it loves you.

So, ask yourself this: What does Christmas consider of you?