It’s December 27th and the house is as quiet as the snow that silently blankets everything outside of our windows in the predawn blackness.
The only light in the room glows from our Christmas village where it sits merrily on the mantle, high above greedy fingers whose enthusiasm threatens to crack its delightfully delicate rendition of an idyllic Christmas. The sight the villagers look down upon, however, is another story.
Our family’s living room speaks of a Christmas that is far from idyllic. The tree skirt is rumpled, and one tiny Santa ornament has attempted escape, managing to settle limply where he has rolled mere feet away. A single stocking has fallen and lays defeated, empty and crumpled at the foot of the fireplace. The lower half of the tree, once glittering in festive Christmas glory, is now bare save the lights that peek out between its branches. The tree’s top half remains ornamented like the tip of a mountain whose snow line creeps down only so far, except the tree line is one that ascends rather than descends – exactly the height of tiny fingers whose curiosity cannot be contained, whose fascination drives them to pluck each ornament for examination and redistribution across the house. Like a squirrel storing up nuts for the snowy season, my 18 month old has tucked away ornaments in every corner of the house, storing up surprises in case toys run scarce. I imagine we will still be discovering them amongst the Easter eggs in April.
If God has graced your home with the unabashed joy of little ones this season, then I suspect yours, too, is a bit more disheveled than the average yuletide greeting card. Perhaps your dustpan and superglue are expecting time and half for the extra hours put in scraping up and mending glittery remnants that trail in your toddler’s wake. Perhaps, like ours, your Christmas Mass felt fragmented, the elegant liturgy and deeply prayerful homily shattered in your mind by sibling squabbles and discovery of the too-noisy toys your children have smuggled in by their tapping against the pews. Maybe, instead of a delectibly and artfully frosted sugar cookie, your bits of prayer were really more like the crumbs that Santa left behind. Maybe the joy of this feast feels distant, observed, and untasted.
If you had a Christmas like mine in which the wreckage threatens to eclipse and the tantrums to drown out the gift of this season, I invite you to once again consider that first Christmas evening – preferably in quiet solitude while sipping on a heated beverage of your choosing. Consider Joseph’s first Christmas. Joseph must have arrived in Bethlehem feeling like an utter failure. Who hauls a woman across the countryside at nine months pregnant? Joseph’s insignificance left him powerless against the governmental forces requiring their travel. What kind of husband can’t secure shelter for his laboring wife? Joseph’s meager living meant he had nothing to bargain with. What kind of father allows his son to be born amidst the stench of manure?
What kind of God entrusts a man like this to shelter and protect the birth of Salvation?
Joseph’s first Christmas was a perfect disaster.
I sympathize with Joseph. My 18-month-old – the ornament snatcher – was born in May of 2020 at the height of the pandemic. Despite our family having no illness, no symptoms of illness, my husband was barred from the delivery room and my son was taken away from me immediately after birth. My husband did everything he could, rushing our older children to their appointed caretakers and arriving in time to stand knocking at the door while I labored alone just beyond. My delivery room may have been a bit more sanitary than Mary’s stable floor, but the situation wreaked of similar indifference and injustice. Having been told by his wife that all she needed to get through her high-risk birth was his hand to hold, my husband was wracked with fury at his powerlessness to provide even that.
This is how I imagine Joseph arriving at the first Christmas: exhausted from a grueling journey, anxious about his wife’s safety, guilty and humiliated about her lack of comfort, furious at the lack of hospitality and compassion, and entirely ashamed of his failure to provide. All of the stench and the dirt and the frustration was the reality of that first Christmas.
And yet.
And yet none of it could eclipse the brightness of the greatest miracle of human history up through that point. God made flesh. Salvation, incarnate. The Lord of Lords and the Prince of Peace chose to descend to us in the midst of the dirt and the manure. He chose Joseph with all of his apparent inadequacies as the protector of His mother. And He selected the poor and dirty shepherds as His first visitors – not the gold-bearing Wise Men. Jesus is revealed to us first as poor, and then as king.
How easy it is for us to believe that only the shiny gifts are good. In all of the dust and the shame and the deep inconvenience of that first Christmas, Mary and Joseph didn’t miss the miracle. The real Christmas, be it that very first night or the daily dawning of Christ in our hearts, is rarely ever shiny. Love is messy. It happens in the muck between imperfect people who wound each other and look past the mess to the miracle that we have one another at all. Christ doesn’t choose to arrive in perfect circumstances. He never did.
There was a time in our marriage when every strand of tinsel stayed where I placed it. No ornaments cracked, my chosen guests devoured my meticulously prepared delectations that no one ever declared “icky,” and at Mass I prayed in blissful peace through every chorus of “Oh Come All Ye Faithful.” It was clean, orderly, and entirely pleasing.
Of course, the God who subverts all our expectations gives us gifts wrapped not in crisp paper and bright bows, but in sticky jam hands and tiny faces streaked with tears shed over disasters both real and imagined. He delights more in the toddler with her head in the pew and her ankles in the air bellowing “Away in the Manger” than in the stiffness of the most perfect posture at the kneelers. After all, it is He who gave us children, who made them to wonder with wide eyes and explore with insatiable curiosity this world that He has given us. It was Christ who beckoned the children to himself, knowing full well that they are children, and that his dusty robes would become even dustier and stickier by their embrace.
Family life is hard. It is messy and exasperating and often reaches the decibels of a jet engine at takeoff. And it is a miracle of endless significance, as each new soul we welcome stretches into eternity. All the broken ornaments and backtalk in the world can’t erase the magnitude of Christ’s love for a single one of us. God wraps his most beautiful gifts in mud and in muck and the real, and we have to get messy if we want to receive them.
My greatest gift this Christmas season? Sitting here in the darkness, reveling in a rumpled tree skirt and half-decorated Christmas tree and knowing that this year, at least, I didn’t miss the miracle.