Christ, Keep Us In Christmas!
We’ve all seen it. Around this time of year, the Christian subculture both on and offline gets papered with the slogan: “Keep Christ in Christmas!” If the algorithm knows we lean traditionally in the Faith, we may have even seen the rarer “Keep Mass in Christmas!” Like most bumper sticker sayings, it’s healthy from time to time to ask what exactly we mean by them, even if just to make sure they still do mean something.
So what do we mean by “keep Christ in Christmas?” Perhaps we are concerned that the Lord is trying to escape from it? One could certainly understand that. Christmas observances as we know them can range from the regrettably kitsch to the outright sacrilegious. Imagine having to cohabitate some seasonal domestic panoply with a bare-chested, surfing Santa! Or perhaps keeping Christ in Christmas is much more linguistic; maybe as a culture we’ve opted out of Christmas for the ever-more-efficient más, or more. That’s definitely on display: a race to acquire and substantiate our existence at the dying point of the year. There’s only a short time left! Give us more!
Of course, I think we’re meant to take these phrases to mean something like this: that it is important to preserve a sense of Christian devotion in the middle of a season that can become, at best, a sentimental cultural artifact, or, at worst, a marathon of rank consumerism. I’m going to assume that no more words need to be spent to persuade us that either of these false visions is well within reach as we travel through time from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. We’re obviously very skilled at forgetting the spiritual significance of time and its seasons.
But does that vindicate the use of the slogans above? Perhaps not. It’s not that they’re misleading in their message. Christ is the true reason for the season. And as a day of holy obligation, the Nativity is a day we should get ourselves to Mass. On the surface, they do their jobs. But that’s where their usefulness ends.
Sloganing seems to me always to be a function of culture war. Our preferred posters and placards emblazoned with messages are ways we throw our cultural gang signs, signaling alignment with what we deem the superior party or in-group. Unfortunately, slogans never require anything more than superficial affiliation. They are satisfied so long as they are merely declared. Unless someone pushes us further, we can go on reciting and consuming sound bytes, embroidering them on pillows or tweeting them to our curated audiences. We can remain unmoved within even while externally we have the right kind of aesthetic in our messaging.
If we’re not careful, even something like the Creed can come to serve this function for us. But not only is the Creed too long to be a bumper sticker, it is also of a different order of speech. The Creed is the narrating of a reality, which does not invoke an idea so much as it makes us present again to the truth of God as He is in the three Divine Persons. To join into the Creed is to become participants once more in the foundational relationships that hold all existence together. We become real again and are rescued from our delusions. The Creed isn’t a brand, nor is it an amuse bouche for the Christian palate. It is an icon of what it is that invites us to stand before it and within it.
So let’s return to those slogans. To say “Keep Christ in Christmas!” doesn’t ultimately help us not only because as a slogan it lets us go on unrepentantly and perhaps even vaingloriously—it is unhelpful because beneath the surface it isn’t true. Christ can never be ousted from Christmas. He is the Lord of this season and the Lord of all seasons. We should be anxious for nothing that speaks of Him being unseated from His throne. All we lose in losing the slogan is that fewer bumper stickers will be sold, and we can surely bear with that tragedy. Christmas cannot be lost; Jesus cannot be absent from it. But, as we must then realize, we certainly can be absent from Christmas.
When we sloganize Christmas, even in the so-called right way, we tacitly assign Christmas to the realm of competing views and rhetorical emphasis. While this may energize the culture war and all the industries that capitalize on it, such energy arises from a falsehood and will always burn itself out. We can drum up audiences to the idea that our beloved Christmas is being taken away from us. But this isn’t real, because it cannot be real. Christmas offers to make us present again to the truth of this time in the same way the Creed makes us present to the truth of God. They gain nothing from our approval, they require our assent and obedience. We cannot defeat or change their meanings, we can depart from or deny them.
Our call to action, then, is not to keep Christ in Christmas, but to keep close to Christmas as Christmas is and always will be. To observe Christmas is to become present again to the fullness of this time, to know Christ in His humble birth once more and to anticipate His coming soon. We should praise King Jesus, and we should go to Mass. But, more importantly, we should dispel with notions that anything in this world can shake loose our Lord from the Feast of His Nativity. Were He to part with it for a moment, the Feast would cease to be. Let’s be clear: we need divine aid to do this. Left to ourselves, we will depart from the reality of God into the delusions of the world. But having received such grace, we must then seek the Christmas where Christ really is, and to forsake the Christ-less and Mass-less imitations that can do no more than plunge us into empty consumerism or controversy. That begins, of course, with our prayerful communion with the Lord of all time, and also this time. He is the Christ of the Mass, and He’s inviting us into His Christmas.
Today is born to us a Savior, who is Christ the Lord! O come, let us adore Him!