Exaggerating Christmas
By Stephen Puricelli
At Christmastime, sugar cookies taste a little sweeter. Family suddenly seems more pressing and valued. You give gifts to people you might not even think about any other time throughout the year. Suddenly, you need to send a perfectly coordinated family photo to everyone you know, and Christmas cards become your primary means of communicating with old friends.
Not all the exaggeration is a good thing. Every family has its quirks if not downright dysfunction, and Christmas tends to magnify the madness. Some members of your family might not want to sit in a room together for a solitary second, but on Christmas it happens anyway! A distant father suddenly wants to see his grandkids; the lovely in-laws determine they’ll just stay with you for a week rather than get a hotel room. Joy to the world.
The other 11 months out of the year, you don’t care if your kids have matching sweaters; but at Christmastime, this is fundamentally important! Suddenly everything’s huge; the good stuff is great and the frustrations threaten to tear the family apart. We let Christmas magnify the odd dynamics of family, work, and relationships. Our lives get a little loopy, and it’s not because of the eggnog.
Perhaps what’s most fascinating about our Christmas exaggerations today is how totally opposite they are to that first Christmas night with Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus. The original Christmas wasn’t larger than life—at least, it didn’t look that way—and it sure didn’t magnify the taste of sweet rolls and sugar cookies.
History’s first Christmas was the celebration of God making Himself miraculously ordinary—an infinite God clothing Himself with finite humanity, a limitless God becoming a bounded person in Jesus. After spending months in a womb, the Creator of the universe entered a world of His own making, uniting Creator and created in a way never before imagined or seen. On this Christmas, the King of kings became a servant to all. The Savior of the world was born to a scared young girl in a room filled with farm animals, then laid in a feeding trough.
As our problems seem to magnify and the good times go a little over the top this season, let’s remember the ordinary scene of that first Christmas miracle as the Son of God laid aside His glory to look very small—approachable, vulnerable, a real man who lived and dwelt among us. He was tempted like us. He had all “the feels.” He literally couldn’t even. And He conquered it all without sin.
If God can “shrink” from Heaven to earth, could we bring our world in a little tighter this Christmas? Could it be that the best way to overcome the exaggeration of the Christmas season is to be vulnerable like our Savior? Maybe it’s not about the good times getting even better, but about us having space to live among the people in our lives.
Because ultimately, the heart of exaggerating Christmas is founded on a lie—the lie that says a perfect holiday is possible. It’s a lie that hides in plain sight on every perfect Christmas card and with its perfect family photo. It’s a lie that says the best part of the season is about making me look my best.
By contrast, the Christmas that matters is a Christmas that needs no exaggeration. It’s a day founded on truth, and the truth of that divine birthday is too great to be talked up any higher. God loved the world so much that He came to be with us and to be like us in every way—real, present, and right there in the moment. The Lord of history broke into time itself and spent three decades sharing meals, sharing moments, and sharing life with fishermen and beggars.
So here’s what we can do about our Christmas season exaggerations: let’s magnify the things that are eternal and minimize everything that’s fleeting and temporary. Let’s dwell on the infinite, extraordinary love of God, and strive to live it out in ordinary ways! And this isn’t just something we do when we’re feeling the holiday cheer. Once we’ve seen Christmas for what it actually is, we know who we as followers of Jesus ought to be—people of everyday, miraculous love, sharing life with the people God has placed in our path, always with the aim of magnifying our King.