Christmas- A Cultural Crossroads

Christmas sure isn’t the same for everyone.

I’ve heard/read/processed it all during my life. Some hold tight to the virgin birth. Others laugh at the contemporary holiday driven by greed. Still others view it as the pinnacle of family and prioritizing the year to come.

Christmas does’t look the same for any of us and it shouldn’t if you look at the mashing of origins.

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As we spend Christmas here in Quebec, we plan on attending Christmas Eve mass at the Notre Dame Basilica. No, I’m not Catholic. We never have been. But that’s ok. I don’t lay claim to how best to honor the season. So we thought it’d be unique to see how it’s done here, in that structure, in their culture.

Because Christmas isn’t the same for everyone.

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I don’t want Christmas for us to be so tightly constrained by a certain religious culture/tradition. It’s not about protestants, catholics or proper liturgy. It’s not about slapping a “Keep Christ in Christmas” sticker on my car, just another virtuous religious war to wage.

The older I get the more I wonder how the Creator sees all of this, how tight we cling and what we claim as sacred. I have always believed in the person of Jesus. Questions abound but I do hope the transcending essence is true. That God so loves us confused people that he continues to reveal the Way, the most tangible being Jesus, along with so many other revelations through relationship, nature and study.

The Jesus story is one we can all get behind. A father and mother from modest background. Their relationship, rocky and questioned by culture. His mother terrified as to what she was bringing into this world. Being birthed in a barn because all the motels were booked. It’s gloriously normal. Full of grit, apprehension and fear. The parents of the Son, the ones you’d think would be most assured, were not from what I can tell. Even they couldn’t get past their humanity. I get it. I relate.

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But that’s what keeps me coming back to that origin story. The light that continues to shine. The humility on an eternal scale. Because it’s the life story of Jesus.

To give.

To examine.

To love.

To hope.

Those are the messages of Christmas.

That’s the beauty of it all. What some view as the waywardness of the season, I see as the awkward wonder in what it means to be human. The many wandering paths converging. The heart of Christmas really does transcend culture or faith tradition. It may not look like what you celebrate but it’s a time for us to link arms in realizing who we are as the created. The heart of the Creator is in it for those that choose to see.