Everyone has their Christmas traditions – baking cookies, putting lights around their windows and doors, sharing family dinners, hanging stockings, watching “White Christmas” or “Die Hard,” setting up the tree so it blocks entrance through the front door (come to think of it, that might just be my family).
Easily, my family’s most hard-and-fast tradition is this: no Christmas music before Thanksgiving.
This year, I must confess, I broke with tradition.
Everyone has their Christmas traditions – baking cookies, putting lights around their windows and doors, sharing family dinners, hanging stockings, watching “White Christmas” or “Die Hard,” setting up the tree so it blocks entrance through the front door (come to think of it, that might just be my family).
Easily, my family’s most hard-and-fast tradition is this: no Christmas music before Thanksgiving.
This year, I must confess, I broke with tradition.
Not only did I start listening to Christmas music before Thanksgiving, I was listening to it before KYXY 96.5 started playing it mid-month. Ask anyone at work – I was singing carols in July. By the end of October, I had broken out the Christmas hymns. It felt good.
But I have a good reason, so stay your battle axes and allow me to explain.
Christmas has always been a favorite season of mine. Some of my earliest memories from childhood are surrounded in the pomp and pageantry of the holiday. From Nativity plays to discovering that it is possible to eat too many Hickory Farms mints in one sitting, Christmas was always an adventure.
As I have gotten older, I have enjoyed watching the holiday take on new forms. One day you are ten years old, sneaking candy canes off the tree, and the next day you are 27, standing in line at a grocery store with five cartons of eggnog and some discount chocolate. I am definitely not here to say one experience is more magical than the other – and you can certainly never have enough eggnog.
In Prague, I watched as Czechs rolled out their own Christmas traditions, some of which included devils dragging kids out of classrooms and stuffing them into potato sacks while angels and Saint Mikuláš handed out candy to the good children.
Czechs eat carp on Christmas Eve. Everyone in the whole country eats carp on Christmas Eve, a feat even more incredible when you actually ask Czechs what they think about carp.
“It’s horrible, I don’t know why we do it – carp is so bony and awful,” they will tell you. “We don’t make the kids eat it.”
The carp is served fresh. You can get it one of two ways: buy it live at the market in the day or two leading up to Christmas and have it killed there at the stall, or buy it live at the market and keep it in your bathtub until the big day. You would be amazed at how many Czechs choose the latter.
Walking around Prague at Christmas time was unlike anything I had ever seen. Yes, the markets are beautiful and the festive decorations trim the city like a magic spell, but it really is the carp stalls that make the city so interesting.
On every corner, you can find a huge pool with enormous fish swimming around, happy and docile, until thwap – they are yanked from the water and slammed onto a board where they are quickly executed.
I am hardly a person of fragile sensibilities, but the Christmas fish massacre was tough to live through. I will keep my silver bells, thanks.
The next year, I went to France with my sister instead. We holed up in a bed and breakfast in Strasbourg after walking through markets looking for ornaments and mulled wine. Unlike in the States where Dec. 24 bustles with last-minute shoppers, nearly everything closes down on Christmas Eve and through Christmas Day in Strasbourg, so we went to a store early and bought Christmas dinner: cheese, champagne, baguettes and a rotisserie chicken, which we slung from our window in a cloth bag that we tied to the sill. We watched the gray Christmas Eve fade into a dazzling display of lights and music from the nearby cathedral and the next morning we woke to the sound of bells. Bells peeled all day long, and it felt like we had woken up in Julie Andrew’s version of “I Saw Three Ships” when “all the bells on earth shall ring.”
Christmas in the States is fun, too. All my friends have different traditions, depending on their religious beliefs or cultural backgrounds. Through all the differences, we unite in a common theme: that Christmas is a time to love each other and embrace what really matters.
And this is where I would like to introduce my “Christmas songs in July” problem.
You see, for my family, Christmas is about the birth of Christ – that is “what really matters” in my home. We love the tree and the lights and I, personally, appreciate a good Norman Rockwell-esque Santa Claus, but my family and I are Protestant Christians, so the “reason for the season,” if you will, is that on that grand day our Savior was born.
Now, if you do not think you need saving, there is not much joy having a savior. I have always been a pretty good kid, so to speak, and I have certainly done my best as an adult, so putting the Christ in Christmas has been as much a political posturing as it has been any real conviction on my part. Like the Czechs and their carp, Christmas was something I did because we always did it.
But this year was different. The last twelve months have been difficult. This time last year, I could not rub two pennies together. My tax rebate never came through, my scholarship application got lost in the mail, my car broke down and I was looking at having to drop out of school at San Diego State University, putting me farther behind schedule. On top of that, I was working four jobs to make ends meet (which they were not) and I was rehabing an old sports injury that would not go away – it kept me out of playing at SDSU and was draining me. Worst of all, I was losing my faith. God seemed very, very far away from where I stood, broken and lost, until one day I just walked away. I said goodbye to a heritage of faith passed onto me by my family and said, “I don’t think there’s a God.”
That was easily the lowest I have ever been in my life.
I may have felt far away from God, but he was never far from me. And, in his own good time, he brought me back. He healed my injury – I ran a half marathon and a Tough Mudder this year! He provided for my finances in ways I never could have dreamed. He took my broken, aching heart and mind and he healed them.
So here I am today, feeling whole and healthy and well, in a trueness of that sense that I have not felt in years, maybe not since childhood. And now I understand how much I need a Savior.
So, in July, when I stumbled across the Christmas hymn “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” the words seemed wholly new to me.
“God and sinners reconciled.”
That is is what the first stanza says. The Almighty Creator and his broken creatures are brought together again through the work of this Jesus, whose name “Emmanuel” means “God with us,” which is exactly what I needed this year. I needed God to be with me.
“Joyful, all ye nations rise, join the triumph of the skies,” the song continues. And it is a triumph! What a triumph! The third verse explains:
“Light and life to all he brings,
Risen with healing in his wings
Mild he lays his glory by,
Born that man no more may die:
Born to raise the son of earth,
Born to give them second birth.”
I am that son of earth, destined for death, not just when the gray fingers of shadow steal the final breath from my lungs, but here, in this life. I have lived death, and shame, and loss, and lostness. I have searched in vain for peace and joy, only to find myself clenching my fists in confusion and pain.
Charles Wesley wrote the words to this hymn in 1739 and yet they ring as true today as they must have then – “risen with healing in his wings,” Jesus really is the Prince of Peace.
So I have been singing this hymn and others because I must sing them. My soul craves those words, that reminder of the great promise of God in Jeremiah 29:11, “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”
We all celebrate Christmas for different reasons. This year, I am celebrating in humble and contrite awe of the magnificent gift that is the birth of this King. And, like the bells ringing throughout Strasbourg, my heart will be singing on Christmas morning.
In fact, I will be singing Christmas songs all year long, full of joy and peace and hope, because I am redeemed, I was lost but now I am found.in 2017.
