Christmas

As a kid there were three major holidays (other than my birthday, of course): Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving. And each holiday had its best time of day. Thanksgiving had the best mornings, waking up to the parade, family, friends and later, food. Easter's magic was in its afternoons; after service and a nap there was candy and the quiet recognition of Christ's resurrection and completed atonement.

Christmas had nights.

Nights were the sky for the constellation of lights on houses; the cold blanket that made all the fires and candles so cozy; and the counterpoint to every colored bulb on the tree. It was the shadow in the tree's boughs, foreshadowing the one who "bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness."

Maybe I liked nights so much because they seemed so mysterious, and that fit with Christmas somehow. The season of Christmas is filled with mysteries: winter days are hidden in their longer nights; people are hidden in their warmer clothes; and gifts are hidden in wrapping-paper.

Gifts like an infant swaddled in cloth. A swaddle is a strip of cloth to wrap or bandage and its most famous reference is undoubtedly in the Bible. That God would wrap himself as a bandage to mankind on Christmas morning is indeed mysterious.

Christmas had nights because Christmas was a night mysteriously broken by the glow of the Christ child- not the blinding light of judgement. The mystery of the Christ child who "has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts" and which the angels brightly proclaimed.

When we are wrapped in the mystery of unwrapping our gifts this Christmas, let us recall that they are shadows of the mysteries of God's love made complete in His gift of our salvation. The nights are great, but only because they symbolize the mystery of a night "whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace."

That's the best mystery to unwrap.