“Somebody said, and it has often been quoted: ‘Be good and you will be happy; but you will not have a jolly time.’ The epigram is witty, but it is profoundly mistaken in its estimate of the truth of human nature. I should be inclined to say that the truth is exactly the reverse. Be good and you will have a jolly time; but you will not be happy. If you have a good heart you will always have some lightness of heart; you will always have the power of enjoying special human feasts, and positive human good news. But the heart which is there to be lightened will also be there to be hurt; and really if you only want to be happy, to be steadily and stupidly happy like the animals, it may be well worth your while not to have a heart at all. Fortunately, however, being happy is not so important as having a jolly time. Philosophers are happy; saints have a jolly time.”
Chesterton, The Survival of Christmas
It is an odd moment when the thing most required is stillness in a traditional bustle. It is a different kind of endurance to cheerfully maintain the house, the children, and the season from the couch. But in the category of every heart preparing Him room, I am not allowed to sacrifice a child to the clean house death cult. Or any death cult.
And so my job this Christmas is to let the house that houses the houses of God inside me do its job for a week or two more. In other words I am pregnant and should avoid having a baby from now to New Years.
This is not my Christmas goal. I want to clean, trim, shine, bake, and wrap, but moving for more than a jaunt to a different chair causes contractions and nausea. So, my job is Christmas joy from my couch. I have a maelstrom of Christmas in sewing, knitting, and laundry if I can sit up to do them. I want to prepare Him rooms, but this year the 6 year old trimmed the tree and the 8 year old strung the lights (across the stairs and along the walls as one does).
The epigraph makes me think of a famous Rooseveltism. Shot, scheduled for a speech, and insistant that he deliver his notes, he quipped, "I am having an A-1 time."
In the Christmasy podcasts I listened to, one quote stands out,
“Christmas take courage.”
-The New Mason Jar, 71
It isn’t because we drama llama it from any direction, but because Jesus was born and we celebrate. He came when it was always winter, never Christmas. He came in the winter of our discontent, and it is only discontent that shuns Him and plots His ruin as merry meetings are made. We do not stop Christmas because of death, Jesus is its executioner. We do not stop Christmas because we think it has gotten too commercial, we make more pumpkin pie and hand it to more people. We do not stop Christmas, we face the life of it. This is the time altering, life changing moment. The light shown in the darkness and the darkness can not comprehend it. Darkness being dark is the point.
There is nothing confronting Christ’s birth that can stop it, from inconvenient labor pains threatening to upset everything to troubles in the Middle East. You don’t stop for the grief or curse when the one who takes our tears away is the one in the cradle. The labor pains were the Christmas bells. And Christmas comes to overwhelm the world because Christ did that already.
You can’t bear it; He can. We get shot, struck down, beaten, bruised, despised, afflicted. Is this at all surprising? This is A1.
Merry Christmas, rejoice.
Have a jolly time.
God bless us everyone.
Further Up and Further In
Kate