COMMENTARY: The Color of Christmas

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.) CATANIA, Sicily _ It is strange to board an Alitalia airplane in Rome on a 60-degree day, bound for the eastern coast of Sicily where they are in greater danger […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

CATANIA, Sicily _ It is strange to board an Alitalia airplane in Rome on a 60-degree day, bound for the eastern coast of Sicily where they are in greater danger of volcanic ash from Mount Etna than snow from the winter sky, and to hear American Christmas songs over the loudspeaker.


Most ironic in this context are the immortal words of Elvis Presley’s classic “Blue Christmas”: “You’ll be doing all right with your Christmas of white, but I’ll have a blue, blue-blue-blue Christmas.”

“Christmas of white?” I wonder how many of the world’s Christians ever see a white Christmas. Or hear “sleigh bells ring,” or see a holly tree, or write Christmas cards for “folks dressed up like Eskimos.”

It’s interesting how specific our seasonal images have become: foods and customs from Victorian England and family-life images from, say, the 1950s _ and how rarely those specifics match anything in our lives.

I have to make several intuitive leaps to track with the season: hear a familiar carol, remember pausing with my parents before a magical downtown department store window, and now leap to the present, see the newspaper supplements as extensions of that long-ago store window and not as garish come-ons, hear the piped-in Christmas songs as nice music and not as bizarre violations of taste, and receive the annual renditions of Handel’s “Hallelujah!” _ an Easter shout performed in reference to Jesus’ birth! _ as yet another sign of yearning and not as a lapse of theology.

Maybe we could all just relax about the old scripts and anachronistic images that appear during the weeks before Christmas. The world is as it is, and it’s that way because of us. If we want something different, we need to change our hearts, not our seasonal decor.

I find it wonderful _ not ironic, but wonderfully honest and authentic _ that the little town of Bethlehem is canceling Christmas this year. It’s too dangerous, authorities said. Tensions in Israel are too high.

Maybe the 19th century American preacher Phillips Brooks could sit unmolested on a hillside overlooking Bethlehem in 1867 and, filled with grief from his nation’s Civil War, write a love song to peace, stillness and hope. But that hillside has changed, and the town below is no longer still. It symbolizes the need for God’s victory, but not the fact, not yet.


Maybe we should all be so boldly honest.

Jesus was, after all, an advocate of reality. Look around, he said. See the poor, see the injustice, see the hypocrisy. Don’t remain unseeing, he said, but believe. See the signs, see the trees bearing leaves and know that the seasons are changing.

It would be more honest, perhaps, if we took Christ entirely out of our cultural Christmas, and admitted that this holiday is about us and our dreams and despairs.

We shop because we are afraid not to shop. We overdo the gift-giving because we are desperate to give love and feel loved. We focus on profits because we believe wealth will make our lives better. We over-decorate because we are sad. We over-consume because we are lost.

This, for us, is modern Bethlehem, and so be it. This is the stable where Jesus is born. This is the world Jesus comes to save. He did what he could do for the first Christians, for village folk who iconized Father Christmas, for Victorians who put the stamp of their style on holiday traditions. Jesus certainly did all he could do for the 1950s, that consistently lamented era when churches were growing, families seemed whole, cities seemed safe, and the music was memorable, if occasionally maudlin.

That’s all over. Now Jesus comes to us in our Christmas. Our holiday is more garish than tasteful, more frenzied than calm, more lavish than humble, and more treasured for the build-up than the Twelve Days themselves.

So be it. That is who we are. That is where God comes to meet us.


Our tacky Santas and nonstop shopping are signs of our neediness, just as a Jewish couple forced to register at Caesar’s whim was a sign of long-ago neediness.

DEAEND EHRICH

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