The Advent of Christmas.

It's Thanksgiving today, and I have many things to be thankful for, including this little guy:

and this bigger guy:

When I was younger, my favorite holiday was Thanksgiving. This was in part due to the ever-edifying influence of my mother, who loved the holiday, and in part due to the fact that Thanksgiving alone is a holiday untouched by commercialization. It wasn't until my my junior year of college when I was in Paris for the fall that I realized that for me, without family, Thanksgiving means almost nothing. Since then, my love for Christmas has been steadily growing until the present day, when I have a verifiable spazz-out any time someone even mentions the holiday.

Let me first start with my love of Advent. This is a holiday practically created for control freaks such as myself (we prefer the term "motivated"). When we were in college, Philip made fun of me for leaving breakfast early enough to get to class 10 or 15 minutes early. I insisted that I liked to be early because it gave me time to arrange my things and compose my thoughts. My sister sometimes reminds me of a time when I practically yelled at her, "Five minutes early is five minutes on time!" I am punctual. I enjoy being prepared. And Advent is about preparing.

There are other things I love about Christmas. It's a holiday that celebrates every sense, from the twinkling of lights in the darkest part of the year to the smell of pines to the taste of cinnamon (what other holiday gets its own spice!?). I love that Christmas is inseparable from warm beverages and cozy houses, which helps us love winter, as you simply can't have coziness without cold weather outside. In fact, Herman Melville says as much in one of my favorite quotations from Moby Dick: "[T]ruly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold . . . If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm." With the irreplaceable snugness and the warmth of tiny lights and candles, Christmas is atmospheric.

Moreover, Christmas is a holiday that redeems the winter, a season I already love, but which, to be perfectly frank, can be bleak and bitter--we recall Narnia under the White Witch, where it was always winter but never Christmas. When Father Christmas comes, he is described not as silly or jolly, but as "so big, and so glad, and so real," which I think must be what Lewis thinks of Christmas itself. Furthermore, while everyone remembers that Father Christmas brought Peter's sword and shield and Susan's arrows and horn, and Lucy's vial and dagger, I had forgotten that he also brings them a tray of hot tea, perhaps because Lewis also loved the warmth and the snugness of Christmas. Finally, Father Christmas announces that Aslan is on the move, and I think this gets at the heart of Christmas. Not simply because Christ had to be born before He could die for us, but because Christmas is about the moving of Christ--about generosity and love and mercy.

Regardless of all this goodness, I imagine there's always a temptation to malign Christmas as the less important of the two spiritual holidays. Sometimes I think Christmas is characterized as a mollification, a time when we can all feel good about ourselves because we don't have to think about our sin or what was sacrificed for us. And yet, it occurs to me that this gift of guilt-less joy, this foretaste of our eternal gladness, may be in fact quite characteristic the God who humbled himself so that we might be like Him.