Christmas has a peculiar way of catching us off guard. Even those who approach it with little religious intention often find themselves unexpectedly moved. There are the lights, of course, small defiances of darkness that seem to insist, stubbornly, on hope. There is the scent of evergreen, trees that refuse to play along with winter’s story of decay. Our tables groan under the weight of food, and for a brief moment, in houses that are otherwise quite ordinary, we dine like kings in castles we only half-believe in. We laugh, we sing, and sometimes, rather inconveniently, we cry. For Christmas has the habit of stirring not only joy, but memory and memory is often tinged with loss.
This curious emotional upheaval is not accidental. Christmas reminds us that we are creatures made for relationship, and therefore made for love. We may grumble about the season’s commercialism, and not without reason. The tiresome pressure to find the “perfect gift” can make the whole affair feel suffocating. Yet even this complaint gives the game away. It reveals that we know, deep down, that shiny objects are poor substitutes for the thing we actually want. We sense that we are meant for something larger than consumption. We are not merely shoppers passing time in a well-lit store; we are beings made for communion.
And this, I think, explains why Christmas persists in haunting us. If God is indeed our Maker, then it follows that He understands our design better than we do. We are not mass-produced articles stamped out by chance, but carefully imagined persons. Long before we learned our own names, we were known. Long before we could reach for love, we were made for it.
One sees this truth most clearly, I suspect, at the end of life rather than at the height of it. When all the usual distractions are stripped away, the illusions lose their shine. No one, standing at death’s door, laments the possessions left unpurchased or the luxuries never acquired. Such things suddenly reveal themselves as what they always were—props, not pillars. What remains is love: the people we have given ourselves to, the people we have failed, and the question of whether we have ever truly responded to the Love that stands behind them all.
Here, then, is where Christianity makes its most audacious claim. It does not say merely that love matters, but that Love itself has entered the story. The Word by whom all things were made does not remain at a safe and reverent distance. He becomes a child. The Author steps onto the stage, not as a commanding hero, but as a helpless infant. The Light enters the darkness so quietly that it can be ignored and yet so decisively, that it cannot be extinguished.
This is why Christmas continues to unsettle us. It suggests that the longing we feel, the ache that no gift can quite satisfy, is not a mistake. It is a signpost. The Word became flesh and lived among us, and in doing so, He dignified our hunger for love by answering it—not with an argument, but with Himself.
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