Blue Christmas Is the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

When the minister asked me to give the prayer at our Blue Christmas service this year, I trilled with delight. Grief is my jam. A friend of mine smirked when I made this proclamation: “Are you going to put that on your Tinder profile?”

I might yet, because Blue Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year.

I love it all. I love the entry table set with somber stacks of programs and packs of Kleenex, props to the holy art of crying. I love the dim lighting and how the guitarist improvises a melancholic strain, perched on a wooden stool in the corner. I love the cookie spreads laid out for afterwards, the Nanaimo bars and especially the peanut butter blossoms. I love the church ladies who hover modestly in the background, shedding tender looks of compassion. Some of them are widows and bereaved mothers, and they know what this is about. They have been around and know that “something is wrong with a world where people came and went so easily” (Saint Maybe, p.111).

Maybe it is a death you grieve. Maybe you’re ill and your life has altered past recognition. Maybe you miss your unborn child. Maybe your friend never calls you anymore, and you feel a strange, stark failing at the heart. Maybe your teen is making life choices that are dangerous. Maybe you realize that in your own childhood, you were not welcomed in the way someone as precious as you deserved to be welcomed.

We are not good at reckoning with our losses. We want to move them through and out the door. The word that we usually use here is “process” — we try to process our griefs. But I don’t know what that word means exactly. I mean, I know what it means in a technical sense, but it is so industrial. We “process” invoices. We “process” data. We “process” potatoes. We “process” chickens — poor things. I’m not sure that we’re meant to “process” grief.

Sometimes we speak about grief in a more immersive or atmospheric way. We let it “wash over us” in waves. We “sit with” our grief. We “lean into” and “befriend” it.

This approach to grief is quite Scriptural. There is little evidence that we’re supposed to “do” anything “to” our grief. It may not be ours to handle at all. It is God who considers our grief and takes it in hand (Ps 10:14). Perhaps we do little more than offer it to him in lament. With tears, like Hannah, or with complaint, like David. With querulous questions, like Moses. Or with wordless groans, like all of creation.

Our offerings of grief are too few. We sometimes and halfheartedly confess our sins, but too seldom do we mark the pains of living in a world disfigured by sin. The Book of Common Prayer has no Order for Lament. We bumble our grief, and that is where Blue Christmas comes in.

Blue Christmas is not a kind of alternative Christmas for unhappy people, the people who will cut short their celebrations because they are still seeing the doctor on December 26, or the people who call for emergency prayer against spiritual attack on Christmas Eve. It’s not only for people who lost their father or who have fled their home in fear. Blue Christmas isn’t for the poor saps who can’t quite drum up the cheer necessary for regular Christmas.

Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray. Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise (Ja 5:13). Christmas is a both/and situation. The ones for whom grief is paramount — they do not belong less to the body of joy. And the ones for whom joy is paramount — they do not belong less to the body of trouble.

Blue Christmas is Christmas. Grief and joy were present in equal measures at the Incarnation, when the virgin mother of the Lamb labored among livestock to deliver a baby born for sacrifice. He was Christ, the Messiah, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. All that grief was out in the open and being gathered in by the One who pays it deep attention and is Doing Something About It. Grief is precious to the One who can handle it.

I hope you will come out with the rest of us to the Blue Christmas service. I will be offering the prayer and pocketing packets of Kleenex — and I have dibs on the peanut butter blossoms.