Celebrating Baby Jesus' Birthday

I compartmentalize both mentally and emotionally like a pro[i]. In many ways, I find this to be helpful, such as when action needs to be taken and I don’t have time to feel all the feels. However, it also has some pitfalls, like when I file something away in the ‘later’ box and forget to take it back out… or when it is Christmas.

There are enough people who talk about the ‘real meaning of Christmas’ that it should be easy to remember what Christmas is all about. And with all of the Christmas movies that my mother forces me to watch that I enjoy watching with my mom, I get frequent reminders of the reason for the season. In fact, Linus tells me several times through the month of December.

And yet, although I am definitely improved in my ability to remember that Christmas is about Christ while also doing the things that are done at this time of year, I simply don’t get excited about Christmas the way I do about Easter. I love Easter, the whole Easter season (you can ask me why, I know just the reason). And while I get excited all through lent, cry on Good Friday, and cheer Easter morning, Christmas feels like the necessary prequel, the sponsor of Easter (“This holiday made possible by…”). I enjoy putting up my crèche and reading the nativity story, but Christmas doesn’t touch my heart quite like Easter does.

But I put my finger on why it does that this year. I have identified the problem (and that always seems to be the first step toward recovery). I have been compartmentalizing Jesus[ii]. I have been celebrating Baby Jesus’ birthday instead of celebrating the King of Kings coming down to earth as the God-man.

In absence of conscious effort, Christmas in my mind is a fairly quaint affair. Sure, it was definitely a bit grittier in real life than in the storybook versions (1. Have you ever smelled a place where animals live? 2. Culturally, Mary was up to nine years younger than me… I can’t imagine anyone trusting me with a baby at that age, much less one who is also the savior of the world. 3. The reigning King is actually a baby killer.) Still, I take for granted that God is doing cool things with the stars, sending angels around to appear to regular people, likely ramping up spiritual warfare against Satan’s attacks, and incarnating himself… and I end up just focusing on a snuggly baby.

Don’t get me wrong. I love babies. Snuggling with them is the best (even better than kittens). It’s awesome that God chose to come as an approachable, snuggle-able little one rather than coming in glory and being terrifying. His coming as a baby and submitting himself to our messy existence definitely reveals an aspect of his character that is awesome and makes me love him. But sometimes, I get stuck on Baby Jesus and I forget about Jesus with tattoos on his leg and eyes like fire in Revelation 19. It makes perfect sense on someone’s 50^th birthday to look at their whole life and the person they have become, not just the story of their birth. That sort of slipped my mind on the celebration of Christ’s 2013^th birthday. Hopefully, I will do better for his 2014^th.

Speaking of cats and Christmas... I think 1:30 and 2:00 might be my favorites,  but then there is every other part, and those might be my favorites, too. 

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[i] For a woman, anyway. To be fair, women and men’s brains are wired a bit differently, and thanks to our thicker corpus callosum, women generally tend to be better at multitasking but not quite as good at compartmentalizing. There are admittedly times when I wish I could put unimportant things away in a box but just can’t. Thanks, brain chemistry.

[ii] This isn’t exactly big news for me. I struggle with compartmentalizing God all the time. I think if I could manage to simultaneously recall and coalesce all of the aspects of God that I (only partially) understand to date, my brain would explode. He’s just so big that if I can keep two or three characteristics in my head at once (powerful enough to create ALL the things, loving father, perfectly just, etc.), I’m making progress.