The Reality of Christmas Magic

Mr Coulombe discusses the "plain old Walt Disney-style wonder" built into the celebration of Christmas, even for the "Scroogiest".

From One Peter Five

By Charles Coulombe, KCSS, STM

And is it true?  And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,
A Baby in an ox’s stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true?  For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare –
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

—Sir John Betjeman, “Christmas.”

Christmas fast approaches – for many (including this writer) the climax and favourite time of the year.  It is an amazing break from routine, and a chance to escape the humdrum and the horrid that accompany so much of everyday life – increasingly so in recent years, it seems.  As with seemingly every year for the past five decades, the Christmas shopping season seems to start earlier and earlier.  Now it commences in many American retail stores well before Halloween, creating a weird “Nightmare before Christmas” feeling – part of the store is dedicated to the orange and black of Autumn’s festival, and part to the red and green of Winter’s.

Yet, bizarre though this may be, and driven by commercial concerns as much of it is, there is I think in the buying public’s reaction a bit of mental health hidden in the oddness – it is yearning, in terms of both observances, for enchantment, for childhood, and for nostalgia.  It is, to be honest, an unconscious yearning for magic.

Now, I am not speaking here of ceremonial magic, or arcane practises condemned by the Church.  I am talking about plain old Walt Disney-style wonder.  It is built into our DNA to search the skies for Santa as children, to lie awake hoping to hear his reindeer’s hooves on the roof, or even to rush downstairs in hopes of getting a glimpse of him at work.  We were happy to suspend our disbelief, even if it was for only one night of the year.

But Santa aside, ever since the first century, Christians have believed – or taught their children to believe – all sorts of wonderful things about Christmas, depending upon time and place.  It is not too surprising to find that the only holiday that got a volume all its own in Time-Life Books’ Enchanted World series was Christmas.  Animals were held to speak at midnight, and all sorts of signs and portents were believed in.  Shakespeare summed it up beautifully in Hamlet: “Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes / Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated, / This bird of dawning singeth all night long; / And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad, / The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike, / No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, / So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.” (Act 1, Scene 1).

Now whether or not we believe in Santa, talking animals, all-night long crowing roosters, spirits, fairies, or witches, there is still something wondrous about the time that we yearn for – and often feel cheated if this or that particular Christmas passes without seeming to experience it.  Whenever something unexpectedly good happens around the holiday, we call it a “Christmas miracle” – and rather think that it does indeed have something to do with Christmas’s wonder and delight.

But so often, especially for adults, the Christmas season can seem bleak and hollow.  If we are alone or without family at this time of year, it can seem unbearable – all of the commercialized cheer is seemingly a mockery of our interior desolation.  There is a reason that suicides spike around this time of year.  Even if we have friends and family about, very often get togethers involve unseemly bickering, and cutting open of old wounds.  If a particularly beloved family member or friend has died since last Christmas, it can seem quite impossible to have any kind of Christmas cheer at all.

To make up for all of this, various Protestant denominations have developed a sort of ritual they call “Blue Christmas” – yes, from the Elvis Presley song – which is held sometime during Advent, and often on December 21, the longest night of the year. According to the website of New York City’s 5th Avenue Presbyterian Church, “As the rest of the world rushes toward the Christmas holiday, our Blue Christmas service reminds us that Advent is a time of quiet contemplation and preparation. This service can also be healing for those who find the holidays difficult. Many worshipers have described Blue Christmas as one of the most beautiful and restorative services of the year.” Christ Church Methodist in the same city declares: “A special service on the winter solstice making space for God’s presence on the longest night of our Advent waiting. This hour-long service acknowledges the grief and difficulty that can be a part of the holiday season with an hour-long service of prayer, song, and contemplation in the chapel.”

We Catholics have no such ritual.  But certainly, a great many of us suffer from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune quite as much as our Protestant neighbours.  So what is one to do if December 25 is fast approaching, and we are alone in a big city or a dreary town, or else we come of a family that is marred by strife?  The first thing is to remind ourselves of just what Christmas is, and what it is about.  At the end of the day, it is not whether we are surrounded with friends or family, but that we are reminded that our pitiable condition as fallen human beings can be ended and ended victoriously.  The possibility of our salvation begins with the birth at Bethlehem and continues through all the Mysteries of Christ’s life as chronicled in the Church’s year, culminating in the tragedy and triumph of Good Friday, Easter, the Ascension, and Pentecost.  After that, the gates of Heaven are opened, and we are enabled, if we wish to avail ourselves of Baptism and the other Sacraments and to lead a good Christian life, to fight to save our souls.  In that context, all of our pains and sorrows have meaning and can have merit.

So first, let us remember that Christmas only begins on Christmas Eve. Let us plan now to try to observe the Twelve Days to our best ability and keep up something of the cheer through to Candlemas on February 2.  If we live alone, let’s try to decorate our dwelling to the best of our ability – and whether we can or can’t, let’s take full advantage of the Church’s liturgy for this time of year.  Do we have no one to spend Christmas with? Well, let’s try to take in Midnight Mass, the Mass of the Aurora, and Christmas morning Mass.  Why not go to Mass every day, and remember to pray to St. Stephen, St. John, the Holy Innocents, and St. Thomas Becket as their feast days come up?  Whether or not we go out for New Year’s Eve – and I suggest we do – let’s go to the Mass of St. Sylvester in the morning, and sometime before Midnight say the Te Deum in thanksgiving for the passing year.  After the countdown and the mandatory gladhanding of strangers, let’s say the Veni, Creator Spiritus for the New Year.  We can go on in like fashion to the Epiphany – and if we are near a Byzantine Catholic Church, we might look in for their blessing of the Epiphany water ceremony and accompanying Liturgy.  After that, let us try to keep a cheerful attitude for the next few weeks – and then attend a solemn Candlemas if we can.

If we live in a difficult family,  while we are not alone, it is paradoxically harder to get people to do things together.  But in addition to encouraging familial attendance at the liturgy, we can do our best to be agents of peace in the extended family circle.  One never knows who of our clan will not be alive next Christmas, and this is a good time to try to practise reconciliation.  It has well been said that all close relationships can be summed up in three sentences: “I’m sorry,” “I forgive you,” and “I love you.”  Don’t let the Christmas pass without our family and friends knowing – in whatever manner is most normal and appropriate to them and us – that this is how we feel about them.  For all the talk of Christmas magic and sugarplums, there is nothing more real, humanly speaking, than this.

But there is far more than merely the human element.  Thus far, when we have spoke of the enchantment of the time, it may seem as though we have been dealing with fantasy and illusion.  But we are not, although we are certainly dealing with the miraculous.  There is a definite connection, as Sir John Betjeman’s poem with which we opened, between the incarnational Virgin Birth and the Blessed Sacrament – “God was Man in Palestine, and lives to-day in Bread and Wine.”  Indeed He does – and this is why the Preface for the Masses of Christmas is also used on the feast of Corpus Christi and the Votive Masses of the Blessed Sacrament.  His Godhead was Incarnate in His Manhood, and every day on all the altars of the Catholic and Orthodox world, that same Divinity, Humanity, Body, and Blood incarnates in the Sacred Species.

Now, this is a hard saying, to be sure.  But of we study all the approved Eucharistic Miracles, from Lanciano to the present, we are confronted with one set of outrageous facts after another.  Wine turning to literal blood – and all of it RH Negative, the same blood type as on the Shroud and other relics of the Passion.  Bread turning to flesh and all of it Heart tissue, with enzymes indicating torture.  Single strand DNA, implying only a single human parent to the subject.  Blood-stained hosts surviving centuries in non-airtight containers.  On and on, in a nonstop procession of impossibilities that laugh at everything we think we know.  Nevertheless, as often as we receive, we commune, quite literally, with that world of wonders.

So too, with the Virgin Birth – implied as it is by that single strand of DNA.  With all of the Eucharistic miracles, can we dare to doubt that Our Lord was indeed born of a Virgin?  That being true, how can we doubt that He is indeed very God of very God?  The Christmas miracles pile on top of one another, on and on, and we dare not dismiss them as pleasant seasonal fancies.  Rather, they are far more real than most of what we take for granted in life as being real.

So far from being a flight into fantasy, the Twelve Days and the season following are actually a forcible confrontation with reality.  But it is a wonderful reality. A wholesome reality. A reality far better and stronger than all the so-called “realism” that an unwise and unbelieving world can throw against it.  Moreover, this reality is not only reserved to either special times of year nor special places.

The truth is that we can have access to this reality so often as we receive Holy Communion.  It is, of course, the most appropriate way to celebrate Christmas by virtue of its close association with what happened almost 2025 years ago.  But by being, as it were, the most potent element of the Christmas miracle, it can bring the joys of the Holy Time to every place and moment when Mass is offered.  In a word, as our homes are transformed by Christmas greenery, and fir trees by the decorations we put upon them, so too can we be altered and made beautiful – not merely by outward show, as with tinsels and garlands, but interiorly to our very hearts.  Let us remember that this Christmas, and begin the work of decking our internal halls.