The great challenge left to us is to cut through all the glitz and glam of the season that has grown increasingly secular and commercial, and be reminded of the beauty of the One who is Christmas.
– Bill Crowder

Christmas has always seemed a bit of a contradiction to me. On one hand, it’s all about cheer and good spirits; on the other hand, it’s generally acknowledged to be one of the busiest and most stressful times of the year. Shoppers who are out to find things to give get grumpy if they have to give someone a spot in a crowded parking lot. Time with family is celebrated and yet dysfunction in family dynamics can be highlighted. Material giving can range from sincere to obligatory, from thoughtful, easy finds to hours spent scrolling through online options or desperately seeing what’s left on a store shelf.

Maybe it’s because we weren’t out much last year that all of this is hitting me anew. The other day I saw a room at a store labeled “The Joy Store”—which of course, I found irresistible. I entered to find a rather depressing warehouse room lit with flickering fluorescent lights and stocked with commercially wrapped gift packages. Apparently joy means stacks of mass-produced boxed sweets.

Our children, of course, seem immune to this. There is nothing about Christmas they don’t adore (particularly—primarily?—the sweets and gifts). But the older you get, the more the curtain is pulled back on the commercialism and consumerism, the dysfunction and sometimes loss, the general truth that the holidays are in the end what you make of them. Behind traditions and an atmosphere of cheer is someone who worked to make it happen, who braved the commercialism or negotiated family dynamics or filled their schedules.

To some degree, the meaning of Christmas is something you discover as well. I am glad for advent traditions and nativity scenes, and we enjoy doing those things as a family, but sometimes I feel like we have been inoculated to Christmas. We’ve received just enough of the real thing to render us immune to its full effect. There’s nothing about the reality of Christmas that one would really put on a card, nothing about the scandal, the obscurity, the unexpected and uncomfortable way in which Jesus first arrived into the world.

These traditions and images, as beloved as they are, in the end are no more than signposts, pointing us in a particular direction. The lights strung on houses and trees invite us to consider what it means for life that is the light of men (John 1:4) to shine into the darkness of our outer world and inner selves, to expose and give life and do all the things that light does. They’re a reminder of the promise that one day they will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light (Revelation 22:5). The tradition of giving and receiving gifts prompts us to consider what it means to receive the free gift of God [that] is eternal life in Christ Jesus (Romans 6:23), to acknowledge that every good gift and every perfect gift is from above (James 1:17). And so on.

It does no good to camp out under a signpost. Signposts are meant to show you where to go, not where to stay. It’s easy to expect the cultural practices of Christmas to generate the kind of joy and peace that we long for, but in reality there’s all kinds of toil and dysfunction and commercialism mixed in, seeping out through the cracks that emerge when we try to make it work on our own. But that very fact prompts us to ask, where is my joy? What does it mean for me to use these traditions as a cue to contemplate Jesus himself? What would it be like to see the complications and contradictions of my experience of Christmas this year, not as failures or frustrations, but the very places Jesus wants to be present with me, and work in me?

C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.” What does it look like for you to look for Jesus this time of year? Maybe it means reading a good devotional or book, that puts old truths in a fresh way. Maybe it means contemplating Jesus throughout whatever activities your day brings. Maybe it means a quiet moment by the lit tree. Maybe it means pressing into something difficult you’ve not wanted to face. Maybe it means simply being more grateful. 

Behold, the angel said in Luke 2:10. Behold, I bring you good news of great joy. God intends for Christmas to bring us great joy, unmitigated, lasting, indestructible joy. But we must behold. We must look, look to where all the signs are pointing, to see it.