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Tis the season, y’all. It is a time for panic to creep up your spine as you frantically grab at whatever Christmas presents seem remotely appropriate for your loved ones. It is time to risk being slain by an oversized SUV as you make your way across the no-man’s-land that is the mall parking lot. And let us not forget the time-honored tradition of Multitask Baking, which inevitably results in an irredeemable mess and the shedding of many tears.
I greatly enjoy Christmas. I fell in love with it after a long era of indifference. My first Christmas with Clay is one of our favorite memories, complete with getting trapped at my parents’ house by a Yuletide Ice Storm and sledding down the street on an old wheel cover with my brothers. There was something so exciting about reclaiming Christmas, as though we had discovered a little bit the long-forgotten magic it used to inspire in our childhoods.
I grew up in a church that did not celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday. When I joined the Presbyterian Church in America, I struggled with the season of Advent. It did not move me as I thought it should. Somehow the Christ Child felt as vague and aloof as he always had. However, in the last couple of years, and especially since I’m now carrying my own child, He is becoming more real to me.
I’ve had the opportunity to see a lot of Christian art in my life, dating from the days of the early church to current times. I’ve always felt unconvinced by the depictions of Mary and the infant Christ. In most old Christian art, Mary is a stoic and remarkably unmaternal creature half-heartedly tending to the stoic and remarkably un-babylike Christ. In current Christian art, sappy-happy is the name of the game, which leaves me just as tepid. And where is poor Joseph in all this? Judging by the depictions I have seen, Mary may just as well be a single mom.
But thinking about how I feel about my own child is starting to change my perception. Clay and I watched The Nativity Story recently, and it fleshed out a lot of my ideas about what this little family was really like. What I find so touching about the Christmas story is not the neatly arranged nativity scene with the shepherds and the wise men hovering near the spic-and-span "Holy Family." Instead, I am moved by the humanity of the account.
There is something so achingly sweet and humble about the way Mary and Joseph brought Christ into the world. Poor pregnant Mary, barely more than a girl, made a long, grueling journey to an inhospitable town where she gave birth in a comfortless stable with no one but livestock and her new husband to keep her company. She was a faithful young woman who was willing to endure scorn and gossip to bear a child who few would recognize as God’s own son. I’ve always been interested by Joseph, who is often kicked to the curb, overlooked in the glory of the Madonna and Child. He was a good and kind man. He was a brave and steadfast man who wanted to do the right thing, and he did the best he could for his young wife and her mysterious child.
Yes, the Christmas story is about angels and stars and a sweet baby boy. But it is also a story about a man who had to hide his son from a vicious, child-killing tyrant. It is about a mother who would come to witness the cruel and brutal murder of her dear child upon the cross. In the Christmas story, the human and the holy blend so beautifully. Along with the lowly stable, there are the gifts of the Magi. Along with the vicious, child-killing tyrant there are shepherds who get to witness a miracle. And along with the Christ’s sacrifice, there is salvation.
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