The Ghost of Christmas As It Once Was haunts us, every one. Everybody looks for it, everybody fancies they have found it (it is usually mistaken for a religious sermon, or its more secular cousin, the bumper sticker) and everyone loses sight of it somewhere in mid-January. It shows up in Christmas lists. It makes the news. It is both sentimental and tragic, all at once. It is what makes a mother squeak with joy (I saw this holy and lovely sight at work the other day) because she has found the Perfect Socks for her newborn, and it is what makes a picture of people trampled under shopping mobs go viral. It can be, to boil it down, hard to put a fist around what Christmas means, and to separate that from what it is supposed to mean, and whether the difference between the two is worth the fuss it provokes every year.
I think the fuss boils down to this: The Ghost of Christmas as It Once Was is for some of us, quite alive, excitingly real and as genuinely human as too much fruitcake. We get protective, because we believe in and live in a story, but a Truthful one. So there are people who lie or disagree about what the story means. But so what? Nobody falls for fool's gold who hasn't once seen the real thing; the dim and empty remnants of what is True and Good and Right and Holy are not the real thing, to be sure, but just because the much-clutched and kissed photograph of your dearest darling can't clutch and kiss you back is no reason to throw the blessed thing away.
And so there is materialism and greed and political differences and people forgetting (or outright changing) what we believe is the (sigh) real meaning of Christmas. Christmas changes and for some of us who believe, that can be frightening. Think of all the time and money we spend trying to stop it from changing! (Of course, we call it tradition, and that makes it okay). Heaven help us if we haven't got every present wrapped, every side dish warmed and every wineglass filled at the exact moment tradition demands it be. But so what?
That is what I've thought of today. Christmas is a little different this year; not badly different, not tragically different. But different anyhow. But, thanks be to God, so what? Every day is Christmas in the soul snatched from the dogs of despair and hell. This wasn't a Christmas like I thought it would be, and that's just the smallest bit sad. But the Ghost of Christmas As It Once Was, if he's jogged my elbow this year, has also taken my hand and pointed me to a Christmas quite a bit longer ago- a Christmas quite enough like this one to make me pensive. Christmas back then (in that magical era we're trying to recover) was different. Christmas was just another day, and some of us felt not quite at home, and a few of us weren't keeping the annual traditions because a very bothersome census had us lugging our pregnant wife around to jump through some bureaucratic hoops. The Ghost of Christmas As It Once Was has haunted many of us since then, whether we see it in ourselves or not. But the Ghost of Christmas As It Always Will Be beats him hands down, backwards, backwards, forwards and six ways till Sunday.
It wasn't the same that year. And every solitary day, thanks be to God, was never the same after that.
One morning like the others in a town just like the rest
In a tavern by the street that led no where
A mother, like the others, finally stopped to catch her breath
Her child's father(still a stranger) bent with care.
Two people like the others from a line just like the rest,
In a country small and puny in the world,
Bewildered with the dice of life that shook them out this test:
That God would trust this simple man and girl.
A stable, like the others, with the usual stink and mess
With the prying eyes of sheep and goats and cows,
A rather clumsy midwife does his poor and clumsy best
And manages to change the world somehow.
It's Christmas, like the others, with the usual fuss and stress
And the busyness of getting versus giving
And the racing and the wasting makes the best of us confess
To somewhat less a magic mode of living.
We are people like the others: without title, without name
And with no great marks to speak of, save our woe.
But to these others came a Father who loved them just the same,
One Christmas like no other, not so very long ago.
