Who Gets to Celebrate Christmas?

One of my favorite annual church gatherings is our congregation’s Blue Christmas service. It’s a special worship service set aside for people who are struggling during the holidays. For many in my community, this holiday is the first after the death of a parent or a spouse. For other’s it’s a Christmas marked by financial hardship, by job insecurity, or by chemotherapy or dialysis treatments. If someone is struggling in December, this season’s air of holly and jolly can be suffocating and isolating. Blue Christmas services are set aside especially to share good news and make space for sadness when society at large has little time for such distractions.

There’s not really an equivalent to Blue Christmas outside of the church. I’m not a culture warrior, but increasingly secular expressions of Christmas do bring out my inner Scrooge. In Secular Christmas, the non-religious themes of the holiday take the center stage, themes like family, winter, romance, shopping, lights, gifts, and coziness. A successful Secular Christmas demands well appointed decorations, a verdant tree, joyful children, mistletoe moments with the love of your life, visits with relatives, a dinner feast, and the perfect gift that communicates how well someone is both known and loved. For those in the right climates, a fireplace, a snowy day, and warm beverages are also required for secular holiday perfection.

None of these things are inherently bad, of course. I love my family, I decorate my porch with lights, I enjoy my kids opening toys just as much as they enjoy receiving the toys. One of the great ironies of secular Christmas, however, is that the supposedly universal expression of the holiday is actually more fracturing, more divisive, and more insular, than the spiritual expressions of Christmas that preceded it.

Here’s what I mean: Secular Christmas assumes a lot about the human condition that may not be true or universal. It assumes that we live close to our family, or at least, that our families are healthy enough or financially capable of traveling. It assumes that you have access to warmth, even though nobody actually owns a real fireplace anymore for insurance reasons. Secular Christmas assumes that you have a romantic partner to share it with, or that the magic of Christmas will provide one for you a la the Hallmark Channel. It assumes that you and your partner are fertile and rearing children, or at least, that you are related to someone who shares the joy of their children with you. That’s a lot more to assume of someone’s life situation than “they’ve encountered hardship and brokenness in their life.”

It’s not just relational assumptions either — Secular Christmas assumes a lot about your economic status. To pay for all the gifts and travel, Secular Christmas assumes you get an end-of-year bonus check, or for that matter, that you are gainfully employed in the first place. This is how all the expensive gifts advertised this time of year on our social media feeds and TV shows are purchased. It assumes we get time off of work, that doctors and nurses and police officers and night shift gas station employees and other essential services personnel have 24 hours where they don’t have to clock in. The conundrum, of course, is that if someone has the money to celebrate a Secular Christmas, they have the money to buy the things they want and need. For those people, no gift can communicate the knowing love that Secular Christmas promises.

The assumption behind the Christian celebration of Christmas is much simpler. The only precondition for observing the Christian Christmas is recognizing the hardship, brokenness, and suffering of the world around us. Each of us, in our own individual way, have experienced the misfortunes of the world, and each of us, in our own special way, have also contributed to those misfortunes. There are no economic or relational prerequisites. One only needs to have recognized the darkness of the world around them and the dark potential inside them to join the religious party, and just about everyone can do that!

The truth is that many of us are struggling financially. We miss our family members that have died or moved across the country for work, we’re separated from or haven’t found our sweethearts, work hasn’t given us time off to celebrate, and the cold winter season is not just an inconvenience but a danger. Secular Christmas, despite it being billed as a more universal holiday, doesn’t do well at accommodating the poor, the lonely, the grieving, the vulnerable, or essential workers.

It seems, then, there are two competing stories of Christmas. The Christian one welcomes everyone without precondition, though not everyone assents to the solution it proclaims. The secular one provides compelling solutions, but there are a number of unachievable preconditions one must first complete. The former is an unwanted gift, a free gift of grace that many send back to the store on December 26th. The latter is, in essence, an achievement, celebrated only by those whose holiday hustle aligns with their providential life circumstances.

It’s telling, then, that the secular world took little notice on that first Christmas night. In many ways, it was the opposite of what secular Christmas is about. The holy family was forced to travel a great distance from the place they called home, surely saddened to give birth to their first child away from their parents and closest kin. The shepherds, of course, were working the night shift, away from their families too, exposed to the elements and dangers of the dark. The Christmas bonus is not earned, but arrives deus machina from a foreign pagan delegation coming to pay homage to the God who moves the stars. Ironically, the one person with the relational and financial means to celebrate that first Christmas from a secular angle responds to the holiday by murdering innocent children. Oh, Herod the Great! What a Grinch, am I right?

Perhaps this is the biggest difference between the two observances. Since its inception, Christian Christmas is for the lowly, the poor, the heartbroken, and the humbled. Those who have been laid bare by the darkness of the world and desperately hope for light actually find it in the little stranger’s manger. As the classic English carol reminds us: “With the poor and meek and lowly, lived on earth our Savior holy.”

For those of you who celebrate, I do hope you have a wonderful Secular Christmas. But I also hope, when you discover the darkness and find yourself needing more than what Secular Christmas has to offer, you know where to find it.