A treatise for Christmas

My new favorite author, G.K. Chesterton, has some interesting comments about Christmas. At this time of year, Christians remember that God entered the human story. He became a human, and we call him Jesus. It is truly a historical truth and doctrine unlike any other.

Without Christmas, we wouldn't even celebrate a Holiday season. But my point here isn't to incite the culture wars. It is to cite the enormity of Christmas in our culture. Chesterton notes:

"Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of the unknown strength that sustains the stars. His instincts and imagination can still connect them, when his reason can no longer see the need of the connection; for him there will always be some savour of religion about the mere picture of a mother and a baby; some hint of mercy and softening about the mere mention of the dreadful name of God. But the two ideas are not naturally or necessarily combined. They would not be necessarily combined for an ancient Greek or a Chinaman, ever for Aristotle or Confucius. It is no more inevitable to connect God with an infant that to connect gravitation with a kitten."

G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

In a paraphrase of the nephew in Dickens' classic work A Christmas Carol, though Christmas has never put a penny in my pocket, I say God bless it! And God bless it for its affects on our culture. Gift giving, and indeed the clamor for peace on earth, are with us because God became a baby.