“I just don't understand Christmas.... I like getting presents and sending Christmas cards and decorating trees and all that, but I'm still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed.”
So says Charlie Brown in the 1965 cartoon, A Charlie Brown Christmas. My nine-year-old son, EJ, has been obsessed with Peanuts lately, and I have seen this short little special multiple times during Advent. Charlie’s friend Linus responds to his complaint, saying, "Charlie Brown, you're the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem.”
I think this show has lasting appeal because we can all relate, at various moments, to Charlie Brown’s morose feelings about Christmas.
Though we are supposed to feel merry and bright, sometimes the garishness of the season and the relentlessness of it all can make us feel that our hearts are two sizes too small or to throw up our hands and say bah humbug to it all.
Like Charlie Brown, we may feel alienated from friends and family during this season. People sometimes find themselves feeling lonely, stressed out by long-simmering family conflicts, financially challenged by the demands of gift-giving, or stressed by social demands. In my house, my wife and I fought about Christmas cards earlier this week, which seems like an annual part of the Advent season. For Charlie, the lovable loser, the breakdown comes when he is asked to purchase a big, pink, aluminum Christmas tree for the Christmas pageant. Charlie comes back with the saddest, smallest, scraggliest tree ever. The other kids see it and say, “You’re a blockhead, Charlie Brown. You’ve been dumb before, but this time you’ve really done it.”
Charlie Brown hits the breaking point. He shouts, "Isn't there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?"
And his friend, Linus steps up to the microphone at the Christmas pageant and reads from the same passage from the Gospel of Matthew that we just heard proclaimed:
“[B]ehold, I bring you tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you. Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in the manger.’ And suddenly, there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, ‘glory to God in the highest, and on Earth peace, good will toward men.’”
That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown. We come to church on Christmas Eve to remember this, to hear these tidings of great joy and to join our voices with the heavenly choir.
At the end of A Charlie Brown Christmas, the other kids have begun to see what Charlie Brown saw in the pathetic little Christmas tree. They decorate it and come together in a circle and begin to sing the song of the angels, “Hark, the Herald Angel Sing.”
The spirit of Christmas has transformed them, and it can transform us, too. It wasn’t to be found in the flash and glitter of the season, but in a scraggly Christmas tree that just needed a little love. Or more poignantly, a tiny little baby lying in a manager.
The world is full of darkness, corruption, and violence. The face of creation is scarred with sin. This is all true. But Christmas reminds us that there is reason to hope. Hope—not a false optimism—but the conviction that God is with us; that a new world is being born before our eyes. Even though the darkness engulfs us and the weight of the world crushes us down, there is a light shining in the darkness; a child has been born under the glow of the stars, in the cold of a silent night. He is the true light that enlightens everyone, and the darkness shall not overcome him.
For anyone who has felt disconnected or alienated because of the commercialism and stress of the season and the secularization of Christmas, the Church gives us a great gift: the twelve days of Christmas, which begin tomorrow, on December 25th, and continue until January 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany, when we celebrate the arrival of the three magi in Bethlehem. Just as our surrounding culture says that Christmas is over, the Church invites us to enter more fully into the mystery of this sacred time and to reflect more deeply on what Christmas is all about. This weekend, we celebrate the feast of the Holy Family (Jesus, Mary, and Joseph), on January 1st, we celebrate the feast of Mary, the Mother of God, and on January 6th with Epiphany. As the tinsel comes down and the Christmas songs, which I think started playing in September this year, turn off, we are called to kneel before the manger and give praise to the newborn king. God bless you, and Merry Christmas.
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