What Christmas Is Really About

Coming down the mountain

Christmas feels more necessary this year than any in recent memory.

Perhaps that’s because we’re in an era of radical upheaval and instability. Everyone can sense that we are on the cusp of great change.

In this context, the annual “grounding” ritual that is Christmas is a long-awaited respite. But when we say that we’re in need of Christmas, or that we feel “Christmassy”, what do we really mean?

Evidently, we don’t all agree on the theology. There seems to be as much secular joy in the Christmas period as there is among the most devout of Catholics. Indeed, 62% of U.S. adults identify as Christians, but some 90% of the population celebrates Christmas.

So what gives?

The Mystery of Christmas

Christmas of course revolves around the central mystery of Christianity: the claim that God became incarnate in the Baby Jesus in order to dwell among humanity. In other words, God stepped down from Heaven.

But let’s just think that through for a moment. In Exodus, it’s said that God descended to the top of Mount Sinai, summoned Moses to the summit, then sent him down again as the bearer of his commandments. But there, at the top of the mountain, God stayed.

In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, something profoundly different occurs: God decides at last to come all the way down himself. The popular image of the nativity takes place in a barn in Bethlehem, but ancient tradition holds that Christ was in fact born into a cave (now marked by the Church of the Nativity) — G.K. Chesterton once stated incisively what this implies:

Christ was not only born on the level of the world, but even lower than the world.

–The Everlasting Man

You don’t have to be convinced by the historicity of this story to be struck by its profundity. It’s fascinating to sit with the idea: this is, definitionally, the most humble action possible.

Humility means to consider others to be higher than yourself, but that is difficult to comprehend in the context of an all-powerful creator. What are we to make of the claim that an omnipotent being would lay himself beneath his own creations? That the most powerful, universal force would reduce itself to the weakest, most defenseless human?

It’s a claim so startling that it opens up a multitude of paradoxes: infinity versus finitude, omnipotence versus helplessness. It is a total mystery. A “mystery” is indeed how it is described in the classical Christian understanding — not in the sense of a riddle to be solved, but rather a truth that just is, but that can never be fully comprehended.

Becoming Small Again

So then, humility is the official theme of Christmas. And if anything describes our own behavior at this time of year (religious and non-religious alike), it is surely that.

It is the natural inclination of humans to want to rise up and control things, to improve and expand endlessly. But Christmas is the period when we forget who we are pretending to be out in the world and come down again to a truer version of ourselves. We leave behind the people we are at work, at societies, at parties — that outward image that we’ve been building.

At Christmas we come down again to be fully absorbed in entirely personal matters, to fuss over relatives and be fussed over. We become small again, even child-like. Controlling the world in these moments is less important than simply being in it.

This “coming down” is how we reassert a sense of stability that we lack elsewhere in our lives. And we do it through ritual…

Why Rituals Matter

Christmas ritualizes our experiences with principles like humility and gratitude. The gift-giving ritual is about prioritizing others’ joy above our own, i.e., an encounter with humility. By formalizing this into a repeated activity, you’re making a statement about what you stand for more concretely than any words could.

Unlike the routines of regular life, which have meaning primarily in the present, rituals confer meaning across time because they deal in eternal principles. They are a way of establishing continuity in who you are and what you believe in. Rituals are a step back from current and pragmatic concerns, toward eternal ones.

Whether you attend a Latin Mass on Christmas Eve, or go through the familiar set of activities and dinner customs that your family has chosen to pass down, you are making a little statement about your shared values. “Whatever happens in the 12 months ahead, we will be here again, doing exactly this, because this is who we are.”

Descend the Mountain

Human beings are infinity-seeking creatures. We strive for endless self-improvement, achievement, and accumulation — and so we should.

But true meaning is always found in coming back down again from the endless climb. Without the return journey, to climb the mountain is rather meaningless.

Life has a tendency to make us strive for that which is always far away or way up high. But every year, we find ourselves back here again, doing the precise opposite. Perhaps what we were looking for was down at our feet this entire time…

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Merry Christmas to all!

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