(WARNING: There are spoilers about Santa in here. If you are a parent that has small children that believe in Santa, be warned before you read this aloud to people you want to continue believing in him.)
Tis the season to be merry and bright. All the channels and streaming programs are advertising Christmas movies. The air is full of the music. It is the most wonderful time of year, full of excitement and magic.
According to pop culture what draws to mind when you think of the magic of the season is wrapped around the figure of Santa. Yet growing up, my family never really had that emphasis.
I don't remember ever actually believing in Santa. Growing up we watched all the Christmas movies. I loved "Santa Claus is Comin to Town", the stop-action animation film that explains the origins of Santa, and "A Year Without a Santa Claus", in which two elves have to convince the elemental forces in charge of hot and cold to let it snow in the Southern part of America so that people will agree to believe in Santa, again stop animation. As a small child, I found the young Kris Kringle to be incredibly attractive, and yes, I am referring to the small dolls in the movie. My parents used to address our gifts from different characters from these movies, like Santa, Rudolph, or Jack Frost. But we knew that they weren't real. We also knew the "real story" of how the legends about Santa got started, talked about the idea of generosity and how different cultures had different stories about him, but that's as far as the belief went.
My parents even had us go take the obligatory pictures with Santa when we were little. We would go to a local museum all dressed up and stand in line to get the picture. They had the temporary exhibit set up in the permanent exhibit about planes and the polar exploration. The planes exhibit was always my favorite in the museum, along with the futuristic circular house and the giant antique doll houses. Knowing that afterwards we could look around the museum and getting to stare at the statues of the polar pilots and their dog teams made the wait almost enjoyable. But often by the time we got to the front of the line, tempers were short. As you can imagine, after they have been standing in line for a while knowing that they could be looking at giant doll houses or throwing paper airplanes, telling a bunch of kids that they have to stand with a complete stranger dressed strangely with a beard and look like they like each other resulted in many miserable pictures in which the children did not in fact look like they liked each other, Santa, or the person behind the camera.
(I have always lumped Santa in the category with Ronald McDonald, of whom I had an irrational fear of and thus despised, and clowns generally. I am not sure why people believe that putting on a wig and too much makeup will endear you to children or make the world a brighter place. I was far more disappointed that Jack Frost couldn't be real than that Santa wasn't.)
Having worked with kids and being of the age that friends and family members are beginning to have children of their own, the conversation often comes up about the magic of Christmas. There is all the secrecy and the wonder and delight, supposedly wrapped up in the belief of Santa. Maybe because I didn't believe in him, but I don't really understand that.
Christmas even completely devoid of Santa is hardly less wonderful or 'magical'. I was trying to think and lay a finger on what specifically was 'magical' about Christmas. And the best explanation I could come up with was candles. Christmas time was one of the only times in the house growing up that we lit candles. (My grandfather was a firefighter.) But the Christmas season was decorated with them.
The first candles lit were tiny little candles smaller than a pinky finger. They were part of a decorative bell. The four small candles heated up the air causing it to rise through a fan that spun causing hanging sticks to strike against two little bells. It was a fun little piece decorated with a star and angels. One on the top had a horn, representative of the angels harkening the shepherds to see the Christ child. Although this angel was more like one of the naked cupid babies and had a bad habit of falling sideways, causing the fan to become unbalanced. This did not help the music produced by striking the little bells to be any more musical. It was one of my favorite decorations because I liked watching the fan spin and it would always sit next to the other larger glass angels that were part of a glass nativity set.
The second and most often lit candles were the advent candles. There are five, one for each week of advent and then the center or Christ candle, lit on Christmas day. When we were younger these candles would be lit most nights in December during dinner and after dinner we would do a little devotion. We never had the correct candles and would often reuse from the previous year if the candle wasn't fully burned. The Hope candle, the one for the first week, was usually burned to a stub, but the last one, the Love candle, could usually be used again. My mom usually let us light these ourselves, although we had to take turns until the last week when we each could light one. Lighting them usually involved lots of arguing and some yelling, on the part of my mom, because we could never remember to light them in the correct order and would light the one closest to ourselves first and then try to reach over it to light the further one. Putting the candles out at the end of the night involved some yelling too. Often we would forget to blow gently and would spray melted wax on the table, the fancy Christmas tablecloth, or each other. My brothers solved the problem by on putting the candles out using their fingers.
The last candle of the Christmas season was lit on Christmas eve night. We would go to a Christmas eve service. Small children got flashlights and adults got candles. As soon as my mom deemed us old enough to not catch ourselves or any one or thing else on fire, we got to have a candle as well. At the end of the service, while "Silent Night" played, we lit the candles, making sure to tip the unlit candle as the flame got passed around the sanctuary. All the lights would be turned off so only the flames were seen. During the repeated phrase at the end of each stanza, we would lift the candle as high as we could.
That was my favorite part of the service, because it reminded me of how the light of the world came into the dark night.
Have you ever seen a picture of the world from a satellite showing the light pollution? It's kind of beautiful. In the big cities there is a ton of light and you can trace busy highways leading away from the densely populated regions. But further out in the countryside there may only be specks of light where a lone car is driving on a road or a spot light is lighting up around a compound.
Lifting the candles up in the dark church always made me think about that.
In my mind, that is what Christmas is all about. Because on that night, probably not in December, into a dark world came the light of the world. And it wasn't just dark because it was a small town in the back corner of an ancient civilization that was far from having figured out electricity. It was dark because while there was hope, it was a small hope. And people were clinging to it but there weren't many. It was into that dark, cruel, bleak, almost hopeless world that the light came in. Hope actualized, made manifest before them, the incarnate God. It is because from that moment on, our hope was solid and from that pinprick of light, the radiant beam from heaven on high, spread. To some shepherds and traveling wise men. To 12 men coming out of Galilee. The number continued to grow. Then through persecution, they spread out from Jerusalem, to Antioch, and from there at least one made it to Rome and another took it south to Ethiopia, another took it East to India. And the light spread, the ember blazed up.
Now as I picture Christmas I see pinpricks of light all around the global. There are metropolises with blazing light pollution. And there are other areas where it is maybe just a single light. But I see it spreading around the whole globe. To every tribe and tongue. Lights being raised up in worship.
That is the best part of Christmas. As a small child I saw the candles being raised up at the Christmas eve service or the candles each night at dinner during our advent devotional or the tiny candles that turned the angel around and made the joyful noise. And that was magic of Christmas. That was the hope. That was the thing as a small child that I knew I could hold on to.
Because unlike the magic of elves and flying reindeer and jolly fat man that fades when you get older and realize that it can't possibly be really, the hope that was born in a manger does not fade. That hope is real.