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Christmas is charged with meaning, both good and bad. For so many of us, it is a locus of vulnerability and pain. I think that truth has been tattooed on my heart since my father died suddenly on Christmas Day 2021. Christmas will never be the same again. Others have their own reasons for quietly dreading the season. For some of my LGBTQ friends Christmas is painful because it reminds them that they’re estranged from family. So many of us have reasons for not wishing to dwell too deeply on this feast.
Yet behind all the human failures, losses, and challenges—and sometimes precisely because of them—the festive season can bring the story of God alive in quite startling ways. Christmas is the festival of the Holy Family and, most particularly, God the child, especially God the infant. While the Holy Family and the Christ Child so often have been idealized, they also model vulnerability, dependency, and relationship. Behind every tinseled image of “Christ Adored” is the story of a mother giving birth to a child in a time when childbirth was defined by risk and precariousness.
I think that part of what mesmerizes me about Christmas is the way its focus on divine childhood and family refracts and amplifies our own human negotiations with family and childhood, with all the mess and complexity they bring. It is the festival where all that is least grown-up within us—our delight in gifts, the love of sentiment, and, yes, sometimes our rehearsals of toxic family dynamics—surfaces and is granted free rein.
