What is Christmas?

Good question. Technically, Christmas is the day on which Christians celebrate Christ’s birth. But like all things grown large in a troubled world, Christmas has become so much more. Christmas is commercialism. It is hype. It is busy stores and long gift-wrap lines. Christmas is exhaustion, fatigue, and often sadness. Sometimes, though, Christmas is bells and carols and sleighs, remnants of the way life used to be. Christmas is things you shouldn’t eat or drink. A spot of brandy. Sugar-dusted confections. Glazed ham or roast goose or whatever you have at home. Christmas is music. Handel scribbling furiously in his madness. Nat King Cole. Phil Spector. Mommy kissing Santa Claus. At its best, Christmas illumines what Dylan Thomas called “the close and holy darkness.” Christmas is a child’s fragile wonder. The hush of snow. A blanket of stars. And the promise of joy. Christmas is peace.

I wrote this in the late 1990s for a dot-com I was writing for back then. It has never seen the light of day…until now.