I got my picture taken with Santa this weekend. For free.
Free? Seriously? You people brought out a real live reindeer and an old, fat, jolly man with the best-looking Santa Claus beard I have ever seen…for free?
Yeah right.
This is it. I am about to fall prey to a Christmas scam. I can totally tell. I will come and they will try to convert me to Scientology or reindeerology or some strange political party. This Santa looks conniving. Can you believe that old man’s smile? He is totally after my wallet!
I have a seven-month-old baby girl; still, I have been the one excited about this encounter all day. I’m that annoying person who thinks it is OK to play Christmas music by November 1 and has the tree up and decorated as soon as the Thanksgiving turkey is off the table. Growing up, the excitement of the holidays was a little too much for me. Every Christmas Eve while my sisters watched It’s A Wonderful Life, I was splayed over the toilet puking up green and red sugar cookies. The anticipation of reindeer and all landing on my roof was more than my little heart could handle. Ok, more than my 8th grade heart could handle.
Santa, Help My Unbelief
So here I am, 29 years old, waiting in line to meet Santa Claus in the middle of a busy North Dallas shopping center parking lot. And as the kid in front of me walks up, I find myself asking, “what in the world are you doing here, Jen?” Santa motions for me to come sit on his knee. Your knee? You want me to sit on your knee? There was a seat in the sleigh next to him, but he insisted that I sit right smack on top of him. I know it’s tradition: you sit on Santa’s lap and tell him what you want for Christmas, but all of a sudden it felt creepy. The magic was gone. Santa was just an old guy who had eaten way too much food and had an unusual amount of facial hair.
On the ride home, a weight settled into my soul and I came to this sad realization: I am officially a skeptical grown-up. No more throwing up out of sheer holiday excitement. I had just spent the entire time with Santa suspiciously eyeing the reindeer and the elves, wondering who sent them; and wondering how much money I would really end up paying, and why Santa made me sit on his knee? Dirty old man.
Yes, everything has changed.
Back then, Christmas started the day after Halloween. Now, it threatens to overwhelm me; I can’t afford another Christmas.
Back then, I spent the night in a deafening silence on my bedroom floor with my two sisters listening for Santa. Now, I try to make sure we are several rooms apart. I do not want to be the one that starts the inevitable holiday fight.
Back then, I ate from every batch of cookies that left our kitchen. Now, I figure out how many holiday calories my thighs can afford.
Back then, I cried every single time I heard the song “Mary Did You Know” and listened to the story where my Jesus was born in a barn with cows licking him and no lights and a scared mom. Now, I have to muster up everything inside of me to try and believe again.
Back then, I was so excited that I puked. Now, I feel the last traces of amazement slipping away into adulthood.
And that’s where I find myself this year. Smack dab in adulthood.
My eyes have been opened. My heart has been wounded. My soul has seen darkness.
Yikes. (Is this an uplifting Christmas article or what?)
Slumlight
Last year, Andy sent out an e-mail wishing the IBC family a Merry Christmas. He told us about a beautifully designed Christmas card that read, “The day will dawn on us from on high.” But when you opened the card, it was a stark black and white picture of kids with swollen bellies in a slum that read, “To give light to those that sit in the darkness and in the shadow of death.”
Geez Andy. Merry Christmas to you too. Who sends that kind of guilty holiday greeting? You can’t put that next to the other cards; the starving African babies might stare at us.
Andy finished, “We can only appreciate the glory of Christmas if we’re aware of how dark a Christ-less world would be.”
When I was a kid, I didn’t see any darkness. I wasn’t jaded. And everything felt magical. When I was a kid, the story of baby Jesus was amazing…but not life changing, because I didn’t know about the darkness.
Now I know. Now I know what it feels like to not be able to pay the bills, to worry about my future, to watch cancer take the lives of my friends, to battle anxiety, to see suicide, divorce, abuse, cutting, miscarriage, and depression in the students’ lives that I work with. Now I know what darkness looks like. And now the story of Jesus coming to us as light in the midst of our world’s brokenness, in the midst of my brokenness, brings me to my knees.
God invites me to step away from both the magic of my childhood and the harsh adult reality that often surrounds me; and instead, to spend this sacred season in the soft light of the Christ Child. Santa Claus, Christmas lights, and cocoa-induced happiness are temporary. Yet cynical grown-up despair robs the childlike wonder of the season. So this year, I am just praying for a collision. A collision of Santa, the reindeer, the little kids in the African slum, the pains from my own life, and then right in the middle of all of that, the baby Jesus with the cows licking him and his mother having him in a barn.
God invites me to celebrate the moment when the sacred collided with the world and became one of us. He invites me to worship Jesus. He invites me into the glory of Christmas. He invites…
And the invitation is open.
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