Christmas Presents

December 15, 2002

Isaiah 61:1-4/ John 1:1-4

In Massachusetts, in the year 1659 it became illegal to celebrate Christmas. Illegal! This happened because Christmas, believe it or not, was one of the articles of contention during the Reformation. Good reformed people would not celebrate Christmas. They would not do so because so much of the celebration at the time was immoral and pagan having no roots in any Christian tradition and it was not Biblical. This was the killer for the reformers. Of course there are descriptions of the birth of Jesus in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew. No problem there for the reformers. But in these stories there is no indication that Jesus was born on December 25^{th. In fact the story seems to indicate that Jesus was born in the spring sometime, because that is when the shepherds would “keep watch over their flock by night.”}

Now you would think that outlawing Christmas might cause quite a stir, it would today but the truth is that outlawing it was not a big deal for most people. In a book about Christmas I read recently, there is a picture of a Philadelphia newspaper dated December 25th 1725. No where on the front page is there any mention of Christmas. It was a minor event at best in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But all that would change in the nineteenth century. And it changed for reasons that even the Puritans might have applauded.

“At the turn of the nineteenth century the social order of the United States was in upheaval. As cities grew, so did unemployment and racial strife, and the gap between rich and poor broadened. There were widespread violent demonstrations especially during the Christmas season, and many of the workers, if not laid off during the holidays, were forced to work on Christmas day.

The result was the most unruly Yuletide behavior. Gangs of angry, drunken hoodlums marauded the streets at Christmas and New Years, threatening the very lives of respectable folk. Something had to change; and so the stage was set for a new kind of Christmas.” Surprisingly the transformation of Christmas was left not to religious people but rather humanitarians who understood the power of symbols.

“John Pintard, a prosperous merchant and a leading citizen of New York, was also an antiquarian obsessed with the past. (He founded the New York Historical Society and helped establish Columbus Day, Washington’s Birthday, and the Fourth of July as public holidays.) Pintard was deeply concerned with the plight of the poor and the resulting unrest and violence during the holiday season. He had an idea that a resurrection of old-time customs when rich and poor celebrated together in harmony might be the answer.”

The trouble was of course that no such tradition existed. So Pintard did the next best thing possible he made one up. On December 6, 1810 Pintard held a banquet in honor of the not yet popularized Saint Nicholas who was venerated among the Dutch of the city as a saint who gave to the poor and to children. This did not change Christmas over night. But this event was part of a process of retrieving and creating traditions that would make Christmas into a much more humane event.

Washington Irving was one of those who wanted to see Christmas become something special and he wrote about it in just that way. “Volume II of Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon published in1819-20, began with, ‘There is nothing in England that exercises a more delightful spell over my imagination, than the lingerings of the holiday customs and rural games of former times.’ In chapters titled Christmas, The Stage Coach, Christmas Eve, Christmas Morning and The Christmas Dinner the author takes us to Bracebridge Hall, where the squire royally entertains his guests with old-fashioned songs, dances, games, and sport. It was the description of an ideal Christmas but the problem was that every chapter was the product of Irving’s romantic imagination. He invented all of it, as he had in his earlier History of New York with its invented St. Nicholas. Irving portrayed an idealized Christmas that did not exist at the time and never had.”

Irving’s descriptions of a longed for Christmas tradition that did not yet exist struck a nerve it seems with many people and another writer who would change Christmas with his writing. Charles Dickens is said to have drawn extensively from Irving as he created his classic A Christmas Carol. Dickens wrote it with a keen interest in the plight of the poor. At issue for Scrooge is how he might approach his life. Christmas is the vehicle for the change in relations to his family friends and employees, indeed his very life. Christmas is recovered as something that can change a life. Dickens finished the work by proclaiming that Scrooge knew how to celebrate Christmas well. And that made a great difference. Quite a change from a holiday that had been all but eliminated centuries before.

Because of these writings and the writings of others most notably a Mr. Clement Moore who crystallized the details of Christmas in a poem we all know the parameters of the ideal Christmas took form. A Visit from St. Nicholas was the first Christmas anything to mention reindeer. It fixed the time of Santa’s coming to Christmas Eve. It described Christmas as a family event and not a public event which was a real change. It had the first real description of Santa. Most likely, any drawing you have ever seen depends on Moore’s poem. In these lines Clement Moore captured a longing for a day that was really special and in the next twenty or thirty years after it was written the traditions of our modern Christmas would be retrieved or invented and popularized. Christmas trees, Christmas cards, the giving of presents, decorating were all enlisted for creating a day not for hooligans and drunkenness but for the very best of what humans could be.

It worked and Christmas hasn’t been the same since.

Christmas is what it is because of this wonderful human impulse to create and transform our lives for the better. This impulse is obvious in the history of our Christmas. Even the day that the ruffians claimed as their own could become the day that brings family and friends close again to remember how much they really need each other.

It might seem like a trifling. So what if our Christmas celebration was transformed for the better? What I really want at Christmas is for the world to be changed for the better. I am with Dickens an Pintard I want Christmas to mean everything we sing about. And I tell you that the same impulse that gave us our Christmas celebration actually gave us perhaps the best part of Christmas. We read today the words from Isaiah 61 and they are inspiring indeed. “Build up the ancient ruins, raise up the former devastations.” These words come from the latter chapters of Isaiah that pick up a wonderful theme. That is that the best is yet to come for Israel. The words of Isaiah gave hope to a devastated people and encouraged an expectation that someday the Messiah would come and God would save God’s people. Much of that hope focused on a return of a king from the house of David. You see David and the Davidic line harkened back to the most glorious time of Israel. And that past glory fueled hope for future glory. That is why we hear so much about Jesus being of the house of David. But there is a problem.

It seems that those glory days were not nearly as glorious as the Bible indicates. Archeology going on right now in Israel seems to indicate that David did not rule over a united Israel. In fact Judah at the time of David was a weak and divided state. David was not the powerful king of Israel’s glory days he was a minor player in the history of Israel. That is quite a difference of even the history that I studied in seminary just a few years ago.

But does that mean that our hope is false and our faith is a lie? This is the trouble isn’t it? We always want our facts to line up with our dreams but they rarely do otherwise dreams would not be dreams. But that is not a reason to throw away our dreams. I would rather stick to the dreams because the facts cannot deliver anything close to what our dreams can.

So what if the creative religious imagination in Israel imagined a past glory that was not quite glorious. That imagination fueled a hope that found its way to a stable in Bethlehem that encouraged a powerful hope and faith that comes down to us today. You can quibble with most of the details of the Christmas story. I know I have read the quibblings but you cannot argue with the power of the hope that has been unleashed with this sweet little story.

You see all of Christmas is on the edge of what is real and what is imagined. That is not a weakness. It makes Christmas the gateway to wonder. And maybe that is what all of us need most. Maybe you and I need to just peek at what could be. And that is what the whole celebration offers, from the sparkling lights to the story of the unlikely birth, we get an inkling of what could be. The hope is that it inspires all of us to be a little more creative in bringing our dreams into reality. I pray that it is so, I pray that the wonder of children on Christmas Eve might just transform this angry planet into the glory of the Lord. Now there is a Christmas dream worth celebrating. In Christ Jesus. Amen.