When I think of keeping Christmas “all the year” I inevitably think about what Christmas means. It is tempting in our time to do a kind of deconstruction of Christmas, and to talk about how Christmas is a Christian festival layered top of pagan midwinter rites. After all, there are so many pre-Christian elements that have in fact been absorbed: the date aligning with the winter solstice (no we do not actually know the date of Jesus’ birth); the symbols of life (evergreens) and light (candles); the notion of birth (life). And yet. I would argue that Christmas (or whatever midwinter assertion of life and light in the darkness you choose to observe) actually takes on its deepest meaning when thought of in conjunction with Easter.
Easter is, after all, the highest Christian festival, the center of the Christian year. Christmas and Easter are, taken together, an arc, the one fulfilling the other. Let me explain. Christmas happens at literally the darkest time of year, when both light and life and meaning are in short supply. The days are short and the nights are long. In the Northern hemisphere, it is cold and life has receded. Most plants are dead or dormant, Animals hibernate, and cold seems to drain our very life force. It is hard at times to see the meaningfulness of life when it is so evidently short and fragile. Christmas offers, in the midst of this literal and spiritual darkness, the bold assertion that even in the midst of this darkness and death, there is life. There is light. And there is meaning. Meaning found in connection. In self-transcendence. In the birth of new life itself, despite the darkness. And that may be enough.
Yet this message of hope is completed by Easter. For what Easter, in its story of pain and brutality and resurrection, says to us is that the meaning, the light, the life of the Christmas story have a transcendent quality. They are not merely evanescent; rather the hope of meaning offered by Christmas transcends even death. By this I do not mean subjective immortality (that idea above many others is a corruption of the intention of religion) but rather that meaning and hope have an eternal quality found in self-transcendence. If our lives have any meaning beyond our every day senses and moments, it is an eternity potentially found in each moment, a sense of depth, of always, that we find when we transcend ourselves in love, creativity, and relation. And that meaning, Easter says, is eternal.
So what would it mean to “keep Christmas all the year”? Openness, I think. Openness to the potential eternity in each moment. In each sunrise, each sunset. In each crashing wave, each dog bounding through the woods, ever in the moment. In each human relationship. In each human achievement done not for gain but for creative meaning or to help another. It is openness to the potential for transcendence we can find each day, if we are open to it.
-Alfred Reeves Wissen, December 23, 2020