A Christmas Epiphany
“Bah, humbug!” my heart murmured, as wreaths, lights, and trees began to invade my spaces this winter. Christmas sights and sounds felt artificial this year, as if men were trying to make snowballs out of dust. With no snow in the long-term forecast, this winter felt gloomier than previous years. What would it take to resuscitate my dry, dusty heart this Christmas season?
As a child in Texas, I never experienced a white Christmas, but I always felt excitement and joy as colorful presents seemed to fall from the sky, piling up slowly around the fragrant fir tree. I would see aunts, uncles, and cousins and consume endless varieties of treats. For younger me, Christmas couldn’t start soon enough.
For many years, my own children’s enthusiasm during Christmas has been illuminating, as each of the four experienced yuletide ecstasy in rapid succession. But they’re growing up fast, and the light of the season seems to be dimming in our house amidst their adolescence. So, this December, I felt like I needed a new spark to ignite my heart and exorcise the spirit of Scrooge in me.
Like a star suddenly appearing above the horizon, I received a text from my friend Joe alerting me that he had extra “golden tickets” to Journey to Bethlehem. I’d been a couple times before, but it had been around a decade since, so I grabbed my youngest and headed toward the giant LED star off Butler Market and Hamby roads.
Talented and committed actors worked hard to convince us we had traveled back to the time of Jesus’s birth, hustling us through several stations decorated to look like ancient Bethlehem. Livestock, rabbis, Roman soldiers, and a real camel (single-humped) made me feel like a kid again, and with each step closer to the manger, the dust of my discontentment began to blow away.
“Do not be afraid,” a brightly illuminated angel proclaimed above us. “I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
My heart racing, I then saw a young couple seated in a stable, looking down on a real baby (no-humped). The baby let out a brief cry of discomfort but caught the eye of his mother and quickly became peaceful again. Here was the true star of Bethlehem, the most beautiful and majestic sight of the whole procession.
As I get older and my children mature, I miss the sights and sounds of babies more each year. I miss looking them in the eye and calming their cries of discomfort. I also miss their giggles and little voices when they sang Christmas carols in the kids’ choir. The Christmases of my youth and theirs are long past.
But a fresh joy fills my heart now as I meditate on the greatest gift ever given—a baby born in Bethlehem. A seemingly simple, small thing, a baby. No ribbons or bows, just wrapped in cloths. No yuletide ecstasy, rather a young family crammed in a stable far from home.
Christmas as an older adult has its own tune, but once I found it this year, it seems more harmonious than ever before. You can keep your classic Christmas playlist. This year, I’m singing for joy like Mary when the Christmas spirit came over her and her cousin, “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior…”
And like Scrooge, at the end of A Christmas Carol, I am finally in the Christmas spirit myself. My epiphany, that the Son of God was given to us in the form of an infant, ultimately to be crucified and raised to reign forevermore over all creation, is almost too much to take in for one Christmas. This Jesus has rescued me from discontentment, sin, and death, and I am now singing the words of Ebenezer:
I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!
