“Santa Claus is Coming to Town” is now playing in stores and “Prep and Landing” aired on TV the other night. With Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday behind us, the countdown has begun, and we have barely three weeks to cram all of our Christmas season hopes and dreams into reality.
Gifts to choose. Family pictures to coordinate. Food to buy. Cookies to make. Christmas cards to mail. The tree to decorate. That Christmas movie we always watch. That tradition we always keep. Our to-do lists dance through our minds, spurred by a strange brand of Christmas FOMO.
I know the feeling. Every year I find myself listing my own Christmas season must-dos, my non-negotiables of holiday tradition. It just wouldn’t be Christmas without making sugar cookies, driving around town looking at lights, and watching White Christmas.
But that’s just it. None of these things make Christmas what it is. Even if the next three weeks don’t allow time for me to find the best local lights displays, bake candy cane sugar cookies, or watch Bing Crosby sing about snow in Vermont, it will still be Christmas.
Would I be happy with that? Would I be okay with crossing nothing off my Christmas bucket list?
Why am I even thinking about Christmas in terms of a list?
We want this Christmas to be perfect. We always want Christmas to be perfect: everybody healthy, happy, and home for Christmas. Presents for all, and enough pie and cookies for leftovers. No one missing out.
There have been over 2,000 Christmases since Jesus took His first breath as a human baby, and we will never fully grasp the wonder of God becoming one of us. God Himself breathing with lungs like every other created person. The infinite, eternal Creator limiting Himself to the tiny body of an Israeli baby in a poor family and conquered land. Have we ever really pondered what Jesus was missing out on that first Christmas?
Paul wrote that Jesus “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” Though angels praised His birth and foreign astrologers traveled far to bring Him gifts, nothing in our world could compare with what Jesus gave up to enter it. For eternity, He had enjoyed unlimited power and perfect joy, but He left it behind—temporarily—to restrict Himself to live in our broken, suffering, very imperfect universe.
Even coming as a victorious human King would have been a monumental step down, as He still would have experienced hunger, cold, exhaustion, and pain. But He went even further, coming into our world as a completely powerless baby born to a poor couple of nobodies, who probably faced whispers and gossip about Jesus’ conception for years.
In December 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer celebrated Advent in his Nazi prison cell. His country had been overrun by extremists and bombed by Allies, yet he wrote home to encourage his parents to celebrate Christmas the way they always had. Referencing the Altdorfer nativity scene, a painting depicting Jesus and His parents at a manger in a demolished building, Bonhoeffer wrote: “We can, and should also, celebrate Christmas despite the ruins around us.”
There was hardly anything perfect at that first Christmas, with a teenage mother and her betrothed husband caring for an infant in a stable hours away from home during a census run by occupying forces. For all we know, nobody in Bethlehem cared about the newborn infant in the feeding trough. He was just a number to the census takers, just a customer to the overwhelmed innkeeper. I wonder what they thought about the shepherds’ story of angels and a blinding light.
None of them could have known that their little town would be remembered for millennia because of the tiny baby with the poor people in the barn. No one would have believed that the completely helpless infant came to us in our ruins to save us from our sin and separation from God, that this firstborn in a poverty-stricken family came to share the riches of heaven.
“I think we’re going to have an exceptionally good Christmas,” Bonhoeffer wrote to his fiancée from his prison cell. “The very fact that every outward circumstance precludes our making provision for it will show whether we can be content with what is truly essential. I used to be very fond of thinking up and buying presents, but now that we have nothing to give, the gift God gave us in the birth of Christ will seem all the more glorious; the emptier our hands, the better we understand what Luther meant by his dying words: ‘We’re beggars; it’s true.’ The poorer our quarters, the more clearly we perceive that our hearts should be Christ’s home on earth.”
Jesus left the comforts of heaven to ensure that we could join Him there. “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Paul wrote, “that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.”
This Christmas will not be perfect according to any of our lists. We will miss out on some traditions and family time, and even if most things go smoothly the rolls might still be burned or a gift might be delivered late.
But because of a baby born when the world was too busy to notice and too overwhelmed to care, Christmas will come. The perfect Christmas doesn’t ride on our efforts, and that’s a relief, because perfection isn’t something we can ever create. To paraphrase Isaiah, the people walking in imperfection—to them, to us, Perfect has come.
Merry Christmas.
Photo by Pille-Riin Priske on Unsplash
