Christmas is the the only good news that matters

Yep. That's me.

Rocking bad Eddie-Munster bed hair and new pajamas, crouched on the floor, reading The Canton Repository.

On Christmas morning.

What kind of child does such a thing on the biggest day in Christian kid-dom?

I'll say it loud: I'm a nerd and proud.

Growing up, I read the funny papers like every child, but I also perused "The Day in Canton" like a 50-year-old housewife. The only thing missing was a muumuu, a pack of smokes, and can-sized hair curlers.

"The Day in Canton" was popular mostly because of its gossipy nature, but also because you never knew when finding out who's been divorced or arrested might come in handy.

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I can't recall what I received for Christmas the year that photo was taken. But I remember, with perfect clarity, the Christmases in which the house was filled with the smell of a capon baking in the oven, the Christmas trees which never seemed to stand straight, and a living room filled with family trying to make each other laugh while talking at the same time. We still do.

Who can recall all the gifts given and received in decades past, but I do remember my maternal grandmother's gem of a story about a childhood Christmas during the Great Depression when she was told she wouldn't be receiving anything, but her parents somehow scraped up the money to surprise her with a fresh orange and a doll.

The memories of Christmas are ones of those priceless gifts that last as long as we have the capacity to recall and share them. As it's been said, we die only when no one is left to remember us.

Try as we might every Christmas, we can't fill the place created for love, with things. We stress ourselves and wrestle with guilt while plunging into debt, knowing full well that the gadgets we hunt and pursue like bloodhounds will be obsolete or out of fashion faster that you can say "batteries not included."

If we aren't careful, the good news of Christmas can be diminished by every scrap of bad news, controversy and scandal, coupled with the doubt that change has come because it doesn't fit our definition.

Our culture is such that it never stops.

Not even the show-stopping arrival of angels heralding the life-changing news of Christmas 2,000 years ago was enough to stop people back then from fretting over their day-to-day struggles.

Christmas has never fit the world's narrative of good news, even though the idea of God showing up swathed in a human body is the single-most important story in human history. Yet, even those who took it to heart couldn't stop themselves from worrying about the here-and-now.

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The idea that God loved us enough to be among us was hard to fathom. It still is.

The late theologian Frederick Buechner said that the idea of the incarnation is so mind-blowing that we've resorted to creating our own, poorly reimagined version of Christmas:

"Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have survived our own blindness and depredations otherwise. It could never have happened otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and strangeness of the grace that has led us to try to tame it. We have tried to make it habitable. We have roofed it and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at best a touching and beautiful occasion, at worst a trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event in itself is indeed —a s a matter of cold, hard fact — all its cracked up to be, then even at best our efforts are misleading."

Why is Christmas such good news? Because it changed the trajectory of everything. It grants us a glimpse of eternity, and shows us how to love when it makes no sense to do so.

The news of Christmas means that we have hope against all hope; that we are not alone; that there is much more to life than the life we know.

It is the only gift worth getting.

Charita M. Goshay is a Canton Repository staff writer and member of the editorial board. Reach her at 330-580-8313 or charita.goshay@cantonrep.com. On Twitter: @cgoshayREP

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Charita Goshay: Christmas brings good news we all can use