The "Unreal" Christmas

It is a good feeling when we feel we’ve achieved something and somehow everything seems going our way. It is often perceived modern society today demands that we should be successes. We are supposed to be the kind who by our determination or personality make our own destiny and triumph over all that life throws at us so that we succeed and prosper.

You can see that message everywhere. In most Hollywood films, our heroes demonstrate invulnerable perfection and flawless ability. They crash cars at speed, climb out of the wreckage, flick off a few fragments of dust from their suit, straighten their tie and stroll away. They are fluent in whatever language is needed, never fumble in their handling of technology and are always cool and collected. They never mistype web addresses, dial the wrong phone number or forget where they put the car keys. Advertisements in TV and print hammer home the message at a more domestic level: everywhere we see smiling families of happy people in designer clothes enjoying cars and holidays. We ought to be perfect, we need to be a winner and only losers mess up and are often ignored.

This kind of pipe-dream that we can play the game of life with total success peaks around this time - at Christmas. Many of us browse through social media posts of messages that read like some kind of annual review for shareholders in which achievements are played up, successess are highlighted and yet disappointments are minimised and disasters are conveniently omitted. We hear at length of the poster’s successful half marathon or diet plan, the successes of their children at school, their newfound attainment of exotic dish cooking, the bliss of those two weeks on a islands cruise, their delight in their new acquired homes and assets. On reading their achievements we can only feel like life’s underachievers – the ones who just had a mediocre year, nothing to be proud of.

More troubling still is what we might call the ideal  Christmas, the one’s people like to see and imagine patterned after Charles Dicken’s numerous stories of celebrating christmas in literature, is just that - ideal but not real. It has been boosted by innumerable Hallmark Christmas cards, decades of syrupy films and limitless amounts of advertising. Although we recognise it as a cliché, this fantasy view of Christmas is something that many of us have come to believe in and even hope for. It is a Christmas where there is a large room whose walls and bookshelves are decorated with Christmas cards and adornments. At the back of the room, a fire flickers. On one side is a real Christmas tree endowed with colour-coordinating ornaments and twinkling lights, while on the other stands a multicoloured tower of presents. Through the window we can glimpse a gentle snowscape (as if Christmas is only celebrated only the northern hemisphere). In the middle of the room is a table piled high with food and drinks around which an entire family sits, laughing, smiling and joking together.

It has presented that this kind of Christmas has no possibility that anything will be less than perfect. The turkey or ham will be cooked exactly right, barbecues well-done, everybody will like everything , the cat will not scratch the presents, the broadband won’t suddenly give up when we’re Skype’ing our relatives from abroad, and everybody will get exactly the present they wanted. Here in the world of utopian Christmas no one will snap at each other, suffer from stress, flu or have the slightest worry about how, come January, they’re going to pay for it all. And it is with this Christmas we know that there will be that moment late in the evening, when peace has descended, where we will be able to sink into the sofa or at the porch staring at the christmas lights around the neighborhood amidst the cool evening air and rejoice in all that life is for us. And there we may even let our minds drift to all that we will achieve in the New Year because there, too, perfection will reign. But that’s a New Year fantasy.

Unfortunately, there are serious problems with this fanciful view of Christmas. It is not truly real - the most obvious is that to put our faith in it is to almost guarantee disappointment. The reality is inevitably going to be very different. We will probably give someone a gadget they already have, the kids will squabble and whinge on their presents they will get, we will be endlessly reminded that it was us who messed the cake or over-roasted the barbecue or spilled the sauce, and worst and most poignant of all, there may be an empty seat at the dinner table… Life has a habit of puncturing the balloon of perfection.

Yet there is another and more subtle problem with delving into the fantasy on offer at this time of year. The good Lord seems to prefer to work when things aren’t perfect. In a nutshell - God seems to be present in messes more than successes.

Consider the first Christmas. Has it ever struck you that, from the human point of view, Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem was a mess? There’s a bullying tax and census demand from a paranoid king occupying power, an extremely awkward and shameful pregnancy at a time and place when society knew exactly what to do with promiscuous  girls, accommodation so unsophisticated that you were as likely to call the vet as the midwife. And just when everybody present might have thought that things couldn’t get any more undignified than a baby in an animal food feeder, in shuffle a rustic bunch of shepherds complete, presumably, with rural smells and country muck. Yes…the first Christmas was a long, long way from perfection. In fact there’s only one place in the Bible that’s messier than Bethlehem...and that’s the cross in Golgotha.

In reality, the messiness of Bethlehem is no accident. It’s in the messes that God is most able to help us. Perfect people in perfect situations all too easily overlook the fact that they need God. ‘I didn’t come to call the righteous,’ Jesus said, ‘I came to call the sinners.’ He might as well have said, ‘I didn’t come to call those who have got it right, I came to call those who are in a mess.’ Those whose Christmases – and lives – are in disrepair are those most likely to listen to God.
This great turning-everything-upside-down principle of Christmas is actually the heart of the Christmas message. It is in fact announced in the very first chapter of Luke’s Gospel where, in what has become famously as “The Magnificat” Mary sings this of God:

He has shown strength with his arm;
    he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
    and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
    and sent the rich away empty.

Christmas is a time when the have-nots has a place to rejoice over the have-everythings; when those with flawed lives can find themselves more blessed than those with apparently perfect ones.

I pray and hope you the very best possible Christmas and the best possible new year. May your Christmas tree lights work the first time, your noche-buena food not go to waste, may you get every present right, may this Christmas give you happy memories that will endure for a lifetime, and in the New Year may you get all of what you hope for and none of what you fear. But if things aren’t as perfect as you would like it to be, be comforted by truth that in Christ, God comes to us at Christmas and in the long run it’s no bad thing for events to force us to turn to him. After all, God’s reality is better than the best ‘unreal’ Christmas.

A Blessed Christmas to all.