David Murdock Column: On a perfect Christmas
As I write this column, it’s a few days before Christmas. Obviously, every year when I write a “Christmas column,” it’s a few days before Christmas. I’ve always wondered in the back of my head what I’d write if it were possible to write my Christmas column on Christmas Day, instead of before Christmas. It would be “different,” somehow — of that I’m sure.
Instead, Christmas columns in newspapers are always imperfectly preemptive. In Scripture … well, that’s another story entirely, one that I’ll leave (mostly) to clergy.
The thing that’s on my mind this year — a few days before Christmas — is how much “running around” we do in the days leading up to Christmas. We humans do all this planning every year to make it “the perfect Christmas” — but there has been, in my opinion, only one perfect Christmas … and that one was completely unplanned by humans. Every Christmas since that first perfect one has been, in a way, a commemoration of the First Christmas.
And, much as we try to make every Christmas a perfect one, we can never “remake” what the world was before that First Christmas. It’s difficult to even remember exactly the conditions of it. Matt Smethurst, writing on The Gospel Coalition website last week, made an important point about one aspect of the First Christmas, a useful reminder of what those shepherds “abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night” saw. No one had ever seen anything like what they saw that night.
After all, Smethurst usefully points out, “These shepherds had never seen a distant town illumining the midnight sky. Electric lights were still 18 centuries away.” He concludes his first paragraph with, “No category existed in their minds for the dazzling display that lit up the sky — and their lives — that night.”
We never think about that in 2023, but it really wasn’t all that long ago in human history when no one would ever have seen a “dazzling display” like that at all. I honestly think that for all our human ingenuity at lighting up the world, no one ever has seen such a display since, either. Just as the shepherds couldn’t imagine a night sky like the one we see every night, we cannot imagine a night sky like the one they saw every night — very few people living today have seen a darkness so infinite as the shepherds did.
So, it stands to reason that no one has even seen such a “dazzling display,” especially since it was of divine origin.
But … we still try to make it a perfect Christmas, and we grow anxious about it if we don’t think we can’t. However, have y’all ever noticed that our anxiety about the perfect Christmas ceases on Christmas Eve? It simply evaporates. That’s the thing for me — no matter how much worrying I do about the “this and that” of Christmas — the part of it that we humans seem to value in the days leading up to it — it simply goes away once Christmas Eve arrives.
Once I noticed that several years ago, any worry and fret I had over Christmas went away. I am aware that, as a single man with no children, the largest cause of Christmas anxiety — making it perfect for children — is something that I have never experienced. However, I was a child once, so I have that expertise.
Honestly, with only a few exceptions, I don’t really remember what Mom and Dad ever bought me for Christmas. I really don’t remember the tree. I really don’t remember anything about childhood Christmases … except for one thing. I remember Christmas dinners — and it ain’t the food I remember; it’s the folks.
In fact, I remember Mom and my grandmother and my aunts cooking Christmas dinner more than I remember eating it. There were all these little rituals they followed in the preparation of that meal that I recall, things like how much sage to put in the dressing and who judged how much was “the right amount” — that sort of thing. For the life of me, I don’t remember a time when the “sage content” of the dressing was anything less than perfect.
Christmas is always perfect … in retrospect.
Except when it ain’t — and even then, it is. I’ve written about it before, so I won’t tell the story again, but the most perfect Christmas my family ever had, to me, was the one when we were going through the roughest time. My grandmother had passed away right before Thanksgiving, and Dad had lost his job earlier in the year and had just started another one that didn’t pay as well. That year, I received the fewest gifts I’d ever got … and I remember every one of them!
The feeling of that Christmas, though, and the memory of it are both perfect.
Now, I will note one thing. Every time this year I’ve said “Merry Christmas” to a stranger, that person has seemed — for lack of a better word — surprised. Why? I don’t know. Every time, they’ve said “Merry Christmas” back … and seemed somehow relieved to say it.
(I’m just warning y’all for what’s about to happen …)
Merry Christmas! Pass it on — it seems to make people happy.
David Murdock is an English instructor at Gadsden State Community College. He can be contacted at murdockcolumn@yahoo.com. The opinions expressed are his own.
This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: David Murdock on the quest for a perfect Christmas
