Christmas

Zechariah’s Prophecy, A Festal Season, and Romanticizing Your Stories

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“The flat moorland at the fell top was a white immensity rolling away to the horizon with the sky pressing down like a dark blanket. I could see the farm down there in its hollow and it, too, looked different; small, remote, like a charcoal drawing against the hills bulking smooth and white beyond.” James Herriot, All Things Great and Small

After enjoying the PBS adaptation immensely, I dove into James Herriot’s book this past week and his adventures as a country vet in Yorkshire. How are British writers so, so good at describing their landscapes, both the grandeur and the hominess? And how can I do that in my writing? 

New England shares plenty of features with Old England. We could give Yorkshire a run for its money in winter cold and snow right now. But instead of great fells and hilltops, we have the ocean, which turns gray-blue in the cold, swallows up the falling snow, and chills bone and flesh. As I read Herriot’s book, I’m struck by the role of light and fire in both places. Warm hearthfires, blazing lighthouses, and lit Christmas trees bring coziness and delight out of winter’s chill.

Zechariah: The LORD Remembers

Last year, I spent some of December studying one of my favorite moments of the Christmas story: Zechariah’s prophecy over John the Baptist in Luke 1:67-80. Like all of Luke, every word and phrase of this passage thunders with meaning. I return to it this year with fresh wonder. Here are a few of the insights that delighted me: 

  • Fulfillment of prophecy — I did some research into the 400 “years of silence” between the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi, and the birth of Jesus. When Gabriel appears to Zechariah in Luke 1:13-17, he’s quoting Malachi, the last prophet. It’s as if Gabriel is breaking the silence and saying half time is over; salvation is on its way, as promised, heralded by one who comes “in the spirit and power of Elijah.” 
  • Silence — The four centuries of silence between Malachi and the Incarnation are echoed in Zechariah’s muteness when he asks Gabriel for a sign. The Lord was silent for about 400 years; Zechariah was silent for nine months before he spoke at the birth of his son, praising God for remembering His promises.
  • Names — Every name in Luke 1 means something important, but Zechariah’s surprised me the most: “the LORD remembers.” Zechariah, Mary, and Elizabeth are all awestruck by the Lord’s remembrance of His promises to Israel. 
  • Spiritual enemies — Zechariah mentions three times that God will save the Jews from their enemies or “those who hate us.” This confused me slightly because the Lord Jesus did not deliver the Jews from their enemies, the Romans, during His lifetime; in fact, the temple was destroyed and Jerusalem decimated in 70 AD. After more study, I concluded that Zechariah is speaking, in the Spirit, about spiritual enemies: sin and death. Physical enemies like horsemen and chariots, vast armies and plagues were never the real issue in the Old Testament. The all-powerful God overcomes those easily. It was spiritual enemies that were the real problem: the rebellious hearts of the Israelities, the sins they fell into again and again. By dying for our sins and calling us to become children of God, Jesus defeated those spiritual enemies and raised up a horn of salvation. 

Hildebrand and the Forms of Beauty and Ugliness

This Christmas season, I’m also reminded of one of the first seminars I attended in grad school that focused on the work of Dietrich von Hildebrand. Hildebrand was an aesthetic philosopher and theologian whose work was only recently translated into English (2016). He studied in Germany, had to flee in 1933 because he was on the Nazis’ hit list, and ended up at Fordham University in the United States. His work on theological aesthetics, or the study of beauty as it relates to God and His work, is rich and deep and clear, like a river overflowing with melted snow.

Digging through my five-year-old-notes, I remember that Hildebrand argued that beauty has a profound role in shaping the human heart, guiding people towards other people and the divine. He argued that beauty possesses a spiritual plenitude, an abundance that works on us without our knowledge. I especially loved the part of the seminar reading where categorized some of the forms of beauty and ugliness and their spiritual implications: 

  • The prosaic — Hildebrand says that a “dull, gray, depressing atmosphere is the uttermost antithesis of all that is brilliant and festive, of all that is abundant.” The prosaic is a form of ugliness like that of an office building or a factory.
  • The sensational and the exciting — He calls this the “false antithesis to the prosaic” and gives Roman circuses, horse races, and boxing matches as examples. The sensational and exciting are a “false antithesis” because they try to relieve the boredom of the prosaic, but they don’t work in the long-term.
    • I remember talking about nightclubs with a friend years ago. “Why on earth do people want to go to them?” I asked her. “I think that if you work in an office all day,” she said, “you’re just trying to do something that makes you feel alive.”
  • Festive — One antithesis to the prosaic is the festive, or beauty that is free from work, free for enjoyment, splendid and luminous; think of Sabbath, holidays, and festivals. 
  • Fantastic — Hildebrand calls this “the unreal world in which the classic structure of the cosmos is abolished.” This is the world of fairy tales, jack-o-lanterns, brownies, and dwarves. 
  • Poetic — The poetic is the true antithesis to the prosaic, the “primordial element” in all arts, “a profound source of joy.” The poetic, according to Hildebrand, is the beauty of a rose, hyacinth, lily, or the area around Florence.

He discusses more categories — the flat, cheap, shallow, philistine, bourgeois, mediocre, and sentimental — but those ones especially stuck with me. 

The Christmas season overflows with poetic and festive beauty: moonlight on fresh snow; trees decorated in gold and scarlet, silver and blue; red holly berries; abundant wreaths; candles in windows. But the mediocre and sentimental show up as well in tawdry blow-up Santas, bright plastic Yankee swap gifts, glaring multicloud lights, and certain movies that try too hard to be heartwarming and feel-good.

At best, Christmas is festal (I love that word). It reflects the kingly joy, joviality, wonder, merriment, and mystery of the Incarnation, the God who came in the flesh to bring light to our darkness.

Psalm 89:15-16 (ESV)
Blessed are the people who know the festal shout, 
who walk, O LORD, in the light of your face,
 who exult in your name all the day
and in your righteousness are exalted.

Everyone knows how easy it is to lose the purpose of this season in all the wrapping paper, jingling bells, colored lights, scented candles, iced sugar cookies, and overwhelm. Real beauty, the quiet and exultant splendor of Jesus’s birth, doesn’t exhaust or oversaturate us the way that the more tacky aspects of Christmas decor or media can. As Hildegard pointed out, true beauty glorifies God and points back to him. 

How Do You Write About Your Life Without Romanticizing It? 

Ponderings on Christmas and beauty led me to another big question. A few months ago, I pondered how vulnerable you should be on the internet. Now I wonder: how do writers like me who love concrete details, vivid descriptions, and good stories write about our lives without romanticizing them?

Ugliness is oppressive. We all have to spend some time in the prosaic world of the DMV, waiting rooms, and underground parking garages or the mediocre, flat, cheap, or shallow artwork of poorly-designed offices or lobbies. I’m tempted to pretend things like dull fluorescent lights, shades of gray, cracked cement, the smell of cigarettes, and the blare of car horns dont exist, screen them from my writing, and just focus on the beauty that is everywhere. 

I have a friend who visited Venice last year. When I asked what it was like, she described the canals and houses in their beauty. But there was another detail: the bells. “They were ringing all the time,” she said wearily. “Day and night.”

I couldn’t help laughing. Put a writer like me in Venice, and we’d be tempted to wax poetic about how the air of Venice rang with church bells to remind people of the mysteries of time and immortality, connecting heaven and earth, calling people to joy and repentance . . . we could make quite a romantic picture. But my friend pointed out the plain fact: bells ringing all the time are very annoying. Both are true.

So how do you reconcile the romantic and unromantic parts of your life in the kind of essay and story writing I love? How do you balance honesty about the prosaic, flat, cheap, shallow, bourgeois, and philistine (to use some of Hildebrand’s categories) while recognizing the poetic, festive, and fantastic wonders in the world God made? 

James Herriot’s All Things Great and Small is a great example of one approach. Herriot profiles the ugly and the beautiful, the mundane and the charming, the disgusting and the lovely alongside each other to create a deeply honest and loving picture of the town of Darrowby. Farms may be perched on lush, grassy hillsides under clear skies, but they also contain animals, and all the unhygienic and unsanitary things animals do, especially when they’re sick. If he left out the unpleasant parts of being a country vet, his book would ring hollow. The real story is more fascinating and ultimately more beautiful than the cleaned-up version. 

This question doesn’t have one easy answer, but here are some thoughts I came away with: 

  • The full picture — Every personal anecdote inevitably has ugly, boring, or sad details in it. While drafting a piece, I can list those alongside the beautiful ones to ponder what the experience was really like. The mundane and the magical will likely combine into a much more interesting and honest story than the cleaned-up version.
  • The point — Each piece of creative nonfiction will have some kind of metanarrative, emphasis, or pattern; every writer selects and arranges details to make a point. What details serve your point? And as my writing teacher Johnathan Rogers often says, how can you love your reader in deciding what to include? Herriot includes some details of surgeries, births, and sicknesses in his book (fair warning), but they never feel gratuitous or unnecessary to me. 
  • The temptation — I have to ask myself: why do I want to romanticize my stories? Why do I want to focus on the beautiful? Part of it is simple: I love beauty. But I’m also tempted to leave out parts of the story that don’t fit the identity I want for myself: an adventurous person who lives a glamorous intellectual life and doesn’t make mistakes. Again, Herriot’s book is a good contrast there; his stories showcase many mistakes and mishaps that made him look foolish, and his self-deprecating humor about them is delightful. It’s a gift to his reader. 

The birth of Jesus had mundane and ugly aspects as well as beautiful ones. Christ was born to impoverished parents in a stable and hunted by a ruthless king who murdered boys of his age in Bethlehem. It is, after all, part of glory of the Incarnation that it happened during the darkness of a ruthless Roman empire, a cruel king like Herod, in a world of dust, dirt, straw, and blood. The real story is far more glorious than any romanticized version could be.

Scarlet, Sleigh, and Gift: How the Story of Santa Claus Reflects the Gospel

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Christmas lights in the snow

I love this time of year: twinkling lights and glittering stars against the early dark; crimson and gold entwined in the rich green of wreaths and trees; the world-silencing wonder of the first snow; frost-flowers on window panes; the merriment that feels age-old and ever-new. This time of year, the story of the Myth-Become-Fact of Jesus Christ, the child of prophecy, reimposes its majesty, mystery, and closeness to our waking lives.

As I said in my last blog post, I really miss putting together “Leaf by Lantern” podcast episodes. I still don’t have the time to record, edit, and publish the audio, but I’ll keep writing out prose episodes as long as I have fairy tales and folktales to talk about.

For this episode/essay, I looked through a few fairy tales that could fit into a Christmas theme until I realized that there is a fascinating folk tale right at my fingertips to explore: Santa Claus. It is deeply sad that many have tried to replace the wondrous Incarnation, in all its holiness and mercy, with the story of a jolly, plump man who delivers presents — like replacing the sun with a cheap flashlight. But as I think about the tradition of Santa Claus, specifically the American version of the story I grew up hearing, I realize that it’s one of the better-known folktales of our age. Though it does have aspects of legend (history + fiction) going back to St. Nicholas of Myrna, who was a historical figure, elements like the North Pole, the reindeer, and the toyshop with elf employees have been added in and retold dozens of times. The “folk,” the common people, have made it our own. And like all good folktales, it points to the gospel.

Literary and film retellings of the folktale range from mythic and enchanting, like The Legend of Holly Claus and The Polar Express, to goofy, like Elf, Klaus, and The Santa Clause, to sweet, like the Prancer movies and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, to tongue-in-cheek, like Red One of this year. Storytellers draw out the threads they like and reweave and reinterpret them: giving Santa various elaborate backstories, explaining the origins of the reindeer and North Pole workshop with greater detail, and incorporating other characters that the audience can relate to. I wrote a Santa retelling myself a few years ago, one of my favorite of my own stories, “Flight of the Gift-Giver.”

So I’ll look at the legend/folktale of Santa Claus in the same way I’ve looked at various fairy tales and ask:

  • How do the images in this story reflect the gospel?
  • How would a Christian artist who crafts a retelling of the Santa folktale do so in the light of Scripture, using the Bible as the reference for truth and beauty?

I’ll look at the images of Santa himself, the sleigh, and the naught vs. nice list.

Santa: Man and Myth

Most of the Santa figures I’ve seen in retellings portray him as jolly and silly, a good-hearted buffoon. He’s grandfatherly and more regal in Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street and something more of a warrior in Rise of the Guardians. Michael Ward’s book Planet Narnia, which traces medieval planetary symbolism in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, helped me to understand the Father Christmas who appears to the four children as a jovial figure, embodying the kingliness, magnanimity, wisdom, benevolent sovereignty, and peaceful prosperity of the medieval idea of Jove.

I see several Biblical images to work with in any retelling’s version of Santa:

  • The color red as luxury — The tabernacle and temple were full of “fine twined linen and blue and purple and scarlet yarns” (see Exodus 26:1 and many other verses in Exodus) and the wife of noble character of Proverbs 31 is “not afraid of snow for her household, for all her household are clothed in scarlet.” Scarlet or purple is a royal color, luxurious and lovely. Whether your Santa is stately and majestic, a kindly grandfather, a holy fool, or a more complex character with secrets and struggles of his own, I would not be afraid to lean into that regal aspect. He’s kingly, with authority over some sphere.
  • The color red as a representation of sin — “Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.” (Isaiah 1:18, ESV). Red is the color of blood; the blood of bulls and goats atoning for Israel’s sin over and over, never enough, and the blood of the Lord Jesus shed once and for all as the Lamb of God. The paradox of a color that represents sin and the deliverance from sin is fascinating. How might your Santa represent the paradox of sin and redemption? How could he reflect the Messiah who was made to “be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21)?
  • Santa’s entry through the chimney — I don’t want to overanalyze this image (it may partly be functional — just a way of explaining to children why Santa doesn’t need a housekey) but I find it intriguing that Santa enters from above through an avenue normally reserved for fire. It reminds me of the Lord sending down fire in judgement on Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19; in proof of His sovereignty in 1 Kings 18; in an outpouring of the Spirit with wind and tongues of fire at Pentecost in Acts 2. The fact that Santa comes with gifts instead of judgment reminds me of Christ who came to offer sinners a hope undeserved. How might the chimney/fire from above/hearthfire factor into your Santa’s abilities and character?
  • Santa as undying — Santa is an old man but immortal. He represents an age-old hope that never dies. While his joviality is, well, Jovial (again, the medieval idea of Jove is of a kingly, generous, serene figure), I also see a possible link to Saturn or Father Time. He serves as a foil for Christ, who came as a child and will never age or die. How would ageless age affect the character of your Santa?

Whether you’re drawn to the goofy or the phantasmagorical in developing your Santa, I would argue one last thing: the imagery of the Santa tale is good. I don’t see a good case for making him a villain. I might also suggest exploring Santa’s role as a guide between the ordinary and magical, like Mary Poppins or Peter Pan: someone who knows the deep secrets of the world and helps others on their quests, their journeys towards happy endings.

The Sleigh and Divine Intervention

The image of Santa’s sleigh pulled by flying reindeer past a gigantic moon is iconic. The sleigh’s passage from sky to individual homes links it with many passages about heaven meeting earth, the divine intervening in human history, the Most High reaching down to our humble estate to rescue us. The image of the flying sleigh coming at night reflects the image of Christ coming to us as light in our darkness, life to our shadow-lives of spiritual death.

But Santa’s flying sleigh intersects beautifully with another of my favorite Biblical images: the “chariots of fire and horses of fire” that come for Elijah the prophet when he “went up by a whirlwind into heaven”at the end of his life (2 Kings 2:9-12). Since reading this story in nightly Bible story time when I was little, I have a fierce, aching jealousy of Elijah’s flight from earth.

Thus the Bible has two glorious images you could use to beautify a Santa Claus retelling:

  • Divine intervention — Light in darkness; a redeemer who “descended”; a healer who comes to a land of terrible sickness; the Gospel of John, Paul’s letters, and many other passages of Scripture give soul-stirring metaphors to teach us what Christ did by coming to us. The more you can emphasize the sleigh as representing heaven’s reaching down to earth — joy in the midst of despair, the healing of a sickness, the lifting of a curse, the fall of an evil dominion, delight that overcomes despair — the closer you can bring your retelling to the mystery of the gospel.
  • Wind and fire — If you really want to dress up Santa’s sleigh, the fiery chariot and whirlwind of 2 Kings 2 could set your story ablaze. The image of fire in the cold of winter (apologies to anyone in the southern hemisphere who celebrates a warm Christmas) is also a beautiful one. The image of Elijah’s fiery chariot also connects with Santa’s entrance through the chimney . . . it’s intriguing how much fire lies hidden in this story’s images.

The Naughty vs. Nice Lists: The Law and Grace

At first glance, the naughty vs. nice list of the Santa folktale is nothing but the old, cheap trick of scaring children into good behavior. At second glance, it’s even worse: pharisaical works-righteousness and legalism, the lie that you can save yourself by Following the Rules. Spiritually, we are all much worse than naughty and deserve much worse than lumps of coal; that’s why we need grace.

And yet . . . as I look at it, the naughty vs. nice list and threat of coal vs. gifts could actually match up to the gospel in a different way. I’m reminded of Paul’s words about the Old Testament law: the law was like a guardian for the people of Israel (see Galatians 3). It was good in that it taught them the difference between sin and righteousness, holiness and defilement. The problem was that they could not keep the law on their own. They failed again and again by worshipping idols, intermarrying with other nations, or even with disobedient hearts as they keep the outward tenets of the law (see the entire Old Testament, or for a good picture of the situation, Isaiah 1). So the naughty vs. nice list may actually have that truth in it, the difference between right and wrong. And apart from Christ, we are all in the wrong.

The threat of getting a lump of coal instead of a gift has some interesting implications as well. In Isaiah 6, the prophet Isaiah is dismayed to find that he, a sinful man, has seen the Lord in his temple, attended by seraphs. In response, one of the seraphs brings him a flaming coal and touches it to his lips. “And he touched my mouth and said: ‘Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for’” (Isaiah 6:7, ESV). In a Santa retelling, an artist could take the disappointing gift of coal and turn it into something ironically wonderful and mysterious: something that purifies, restores, and redeems.

What about good gifts that are alternatives to coal? I don’t feel that plastic toys and mindless entertainment make the best symbol for the awesome gift of eternal oneness with the Living God. But as I thought about it, the idea of a child’s toy as something meant simply for joy and wonder, not a tool for labor or education, reflects the gratuitous, abundant richness of God’s goodness. If coal could be something glorious, what would a more direct symbol of divine grace be? I had a couple of ideas:

  • A gold ring — Gold as a nod to the golden streets of heaven; a ring as a sign of the covenant between Christ and His Bride, the Church
  • A key — Something that would open doors to adventure and mystery in your story, and also reflect Christ’s possession of the key of David (Revelation 3:7)
  • A dove — A living creature who acts as a guide, counselor, comforter, or helper, as a nod to the Holy Spirit
  • A music box or musical instrument — Something of delicate workmanship that makes music, an outlet of praise and awe

Hope everyone has a Merry Christmas! May good stories, feasting, and fellowship renew our wonder in the love of the Mighty King who clothes us in righteousness, washes us white as snow, descended into our darkness, and gives us the gift of Himself.

A New Song: Winter Pages for the Holiday Season

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Red ornament on a street at night


Sing to the LORD a new song,
his praise from the end of the earth,
you who go down to the sea, and all that fills it,
the coastlands and their inhabitants.
Isaiah 42:10 (ESV)

This past November, I tried the Poem-a-Day challenge for the first time. I participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) last year, churning out 1600+ words a day with a purring cat in my lap and a woodsmoke-scented candle perfuming the room. The challenge was a forge for my imagination, refining but painful. I wasn’t sure I could do it again. But one poem a day? If I tossed meter and rhyme and extensive revisions out the window, I could do that. 

The Poetry Pub’s prompts were magical. I struggled with some of them, especially “syzygy,” but I rediscovered an old pleasure with the hardest ones. The mental wrestling required to make an image work, to tie the first and lines together back to the same idea, and to make the last line of a poem ring like struck crystal, gave me a thrill I had forgotten. I glimpsed connections between memories, ideas, and stories I had never seen before – relationships and geometry, conversations and pottery, cold wood stoves and loneliness, staircases and nostalgia. I remembered the joyful labor to sing a new song.

Most of my poems were too messy or too personal to share here, but this one is my favorite:

Theme: Currents

Fall Semester, 2016

The awful responsibility of Time, 
My Southern Lit professor intoned
With the resonance of a great brass bell.
The west wind rustled crimson leaves across campus.
Flocks of absentee ballots launched from the mailroom.

What if time is a pool and not a river? I wrote, 
Hazelnut coffee in hand, looking out the window,
Where afternoon gilded the red brick archway
Over the ebb and flow of class times and mealtimes.

Wolf Creek! Wolf Creek! The frequent chant: 
A parade of friends carrying the newly-engaged to the river
To throw them, laughing, into the current of days.

 “A poem is judged by its last line,” my British literature professor told us in my freshmen year. “A good poem has a good ending.” Messy as this poem is, I was proud of that last line. 

The current of days has carried November away, and we are in Advent again. This year, a writer-friend named Reagan Dregge and I are approaching winter with a new creative collaboration: a letter subscription with a matching website centered on the theme of rest, stillness, and abiding. It’s called Winter Pages, and the first few contributions have already given me the refreshment of delight.

November’s Poem-a-Day challenge was, unexpectedly, excellent preparation for Advent and the Winter Pages project. Pounding out a poem a day – raw, rough-edged, and unglazed – forced me to see fresh wonders, intricate complexities, and startling relationships. Similes served as intricate bridges between memories, dreams, ideas, and longings; metaphors were copper mirrors that recast the world in mesmerizing shades; alliteration chimed cheerfully; the few formal styles I tried, including a villanelle, were crucibles which forced me to bend my words into beautiful shapes. Poetry forced me to see and make things with new eyes. 

In the same way, the artists participating in the Winter Pages project are helping renew my sight, restoring and re-illuminating the colors and textures of the ancient story. Reagan Dregge’s introduction and musings on green and gold and shades of gray gave me the coziness of the winter prairie in Minnesota and reminded me of our eversummer hope. Tyler Rogness’s description of an ensnowed maple tree recaptures the waiting and Resurrection that Christmastide looks forward to. Jaclyn Hoselton’s meditation on Mary’s Magnificat emphasizes the breathless wonder of Gabriel’s message and Mary’s creative response. Joy Manning’s poem re-tuned me to the unutterable longing and endless beauty of starlight. Sara Bannerman and Margaret Bush’s playlists invite me into the ministry of music, which can weave celebration, lament, suffering, and hope into beauty. More contributions are coming – ponderings on joy, solace, and seeking.

The last Poem-a-Day prompt, November 30’s, was “You, Too?” The idea comes from C.S. Lewis’s Four Loves, where he says, “The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’” (Chapter on Friendship, pg. 83). Happy but exhausted from the feasting and travel of Thanksgiving, I was too tired to come up with a poem for that one. It has been a year of solitary drives, new faces and known ones, deep conversations, laughter, and long silences, but not many of those fresh “you, too?” moments. 

But then I realized: working with other artists to honor the “still point of this turning world” (to steal from T.S. Eliot), a refuge of quiet in this busy season, is a better expression of that magical “you, too?” than any poem I could have manufactured to fit that theme. I am only one of many who are trying to sing a new song.

Christmas: Maturing into Wonder

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Gold Bell On Top Of Brown Table from https://www.pexels.com/photo/gold-bell-on-top-of-brown-table-754711/

I was eight when I lost my first love for Christmas. It was December, but I wasn’t as excited about it as in previous years. Ever since I could remember, post-Thanksgiving had been a season of burning anticipation, counting down the days, eating Advent-calendar chocolates, and dreaming of presents. 

At eight years old, I was worried when that wild excitement didn’t come. I tried to manufacture the feeling, but you can’t manufacture feelings. 

So I went to my mom (the family expert on feelings). I don’t remember her exact words, but I remember her comforting me that sometimes you lose things like feelings when you get older. And that’s alright – you can enjoy Christmas without that wild joy.

I had to let go of the raw intensity of excitement I had in early childhood. But looking back now, I gained something better: reality-grounded, heaven-centered wonder.

Wonder and joy are supposed to be children’s domain during Christmas, and they are: I remember sensual joys (twinkling golden lights and red ribbons among evergreens, bells jingling, the smells of gingerbread and peppermint, the taste of sugar cookies) and material ones (I really liked getting presents). 

But the real volta came when I learned the true miracle of this feast: why it was so special that Christ was born to a virgin. Though I sang “Silent Night” and read the story about the angel coming to Mary, I didn’t understand this marvel until I learned about ordinary conception. Only then could I start to grasp the weight of this glory.

New wonders followed: I learned from Romans how Christ is the second Adam, the perfect man who defeated temptation and brought life to the human race. I learned how Christ is the seed promised to Eve, who crushed the serpent, the dragon described in Revelation. I learned how Christ is the Messiah who was prefigured and foreshadowed throughout the Old Testament in Joshua and Melchizedek. 

Ironically, it was growing into adulthood and learning more about the world – which usually, in children’s stories like “The Polar Express,” mean a loss of imagination and wonder – that gave me the deepest awe.

Like everyone, I’ve been busy this Christmas season. I’ve actually been a little annoyed at how many festivities we cram into one month: why can’t we allocate some of this beauty and merry-making to when we’ll need it even more, in those last deadening months of winter? I haven’t made enough time to meditate on the joy, the wonder, the thanksgiving of the Incarnation yet.

So I’ll steal a few moments to breathe it in, taste and see the tender, terrifying, awesome grace of the God who was born to a virgin, our Healer and Redeemer and King, to rekindle hope in a dark world.

Winter Dreams and Waiting

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Woods filled with snow.

L.M. Montgmery hated winter. In Looking for Anne of Green Gables, Irene Gammel, one of the leading scholars of Montgomery’s work, points out that Anne of Green Gables has many delightful scenes of spring, summer, and fall, but almost no scenes of winter beauty except for Christmas and the morning after Anne saves Diana’s sister’s life (147-48). Gammel also tell us that Montgomery dreamed up the luxurious gardens of the book during the winter of 1905, reading flower seed catalogs by the fire when she was snowbound in a cold house with her grandmother (65).

I read L.M. Montgomery’s journals through late winter and early spring of 2017. I felt a curious connection with her, especially when I reached 1898, when she is 23 years old. I was 22. She stopped teaching and moved home to take care of her aging grandmother and try to make a living as a writer. I also lived at home, supported by my parents as I applied to every writing or editing job within a 50-mile radius.

Montgmery’s grandmother wouldn’t let her have a fire in her room during Prince Edward Island’s frigid winters, so she sacrificed privacy for warmth and worked in the kitchen. She lived that life for 13 years. She read, wrote, went to concerts, prayer meetings, literary societies, and parties, weathered winters and enjoyed summers until her grandmother died and she married Ewen Macdonald in 1911. By then, she had published Anne of Green Gables in 1908 and become internationally famous. It wasn’t a perfect happy ending – she experienced marital turbulence, legal battles, and the world-rending of the Great War – but that long season of waiting stood out for me.

I was blessed with a much shorter time of waiting. I found a job within a few months, continued to research L.M. Montgomery’s life and work, and explored the questions of young adulthood: after securing a place to live and a job, what do you live for? How do you build community and fill your time? What is your purpose? 

Of all seasons, winter feels most like the time of waiting; at first, we wait for Christmas, and then through February and March, for the relief of spring. We wait for plows to carry away the snow and spread sand and salt so we can drive to work; for our defrosters to melt the ice on our windshields; for sunrise to creep back and sunset to glide forward. 

And in that waiting, we rejoice. We hang golden Christmas lights and kindle cozy hearth fires, watch snow soften the silent world, wonder at the blue-light mornings and blazing sunsets, and sip hot chocolate with frozen fingers. We ski or snowshoe through the white-smothered woods, or skate across glass-paved ponds. 

In the midst of the early snow in these first weeks of December, I finished the book of Isaiah after studying it since August. As the days darkened and cold settled in, I was awed by the book’s summer-storm beauty: harsh blasts of judgement on idolatry, injustice, and disobedience, followed by the rumblings of forgiveness and warm shower of grace. 

Reading Isaiah after the fulfillment of many of its prophecies is a delight. The book gleams with foretellings of the hovering Holy Spirit, the restoration and gathering of the nations, the child Immanuel, the righteous Savior to come, the suffering Servant and triumphant King. The Jewish people waited and wondered for the Messiah for centuries before He came.

Even now, some of the greatest prophecies of Isaiah – the gathering and peace on the holy mountain of the Lord, and the new heavens and the new earth – are still unfulfilled. We are still waiting.

This winter, I hope I can rejoice in the waiting. I want to love the sun glittering on the snow, even in those last days when the drifts are slushy and dirt-encrusted. I want to notice how the lack of leaves lets you see the azure clarity of the sky, and your misty breaths make you feel dragonish. I want to dream up stories that help other people see the enchantment of this frozen world, as well as wait for crocus shoots and thawing breezes, through this time of stillness.