December 23, 2020 at 1:41 p.m.
Merry Christmas and a Happier New Year
Merry Christmas and a Happier New Year
Each year brings to each of us our own unique triumphs and tragedies, of course, our gains and losses and satisfactions and struggles. This year has been no different. It's just that this year, the pandemic sweeping the world, and the various manifestations and responses to it, are common to us all.
This year we can look each other in the eyes (if not the entire face) and offer a mutual Merry Christmas that is perhaps more urgent and resolute, more knowing, than usual. Our Merry Christmas to all of you certainly is. We wish for each of you the faith needed and the resilience we know you possess to make all your worries finally subside and your world to rightsize and take flight.
We can - and do - wish for all the world to have a happier New Year in 2021.
The Christmas season is always a time for healing and a time of hope, and this year, Christmas is more important than ever.
For one thing, Christmas is about children, and that cannot be lost in a year that most children must find bewildering. Not least, Christmas is about that child within us all. Roasting turkey and hot apple cider, Jingle Bells and candy canes and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer - for a short time the world is transformed into a child's paradise, and it is hard not to submit to its epistemological parameters.
This year all our children deserve Christmas' special colors and smells and tastes.
For Christians, of course, the day commemorates the birth of Jesus, but for all the children of the world, for Christian and non-Christian, Christmas and New Year's and Hanukkah and secular celebrations, too - the all-purpose year-end holiday wrapped in its festive package-can and should be treated as a season of renewal and fresh faith, a time to let bygones be bygones, a chance to begin again with a clean slate, a time to declare that, as a human community, we can persevere and overcome.
As such, it is a time for peace and for the hope of peace. In such a world there is no poverty. There is no war. There is no pandemic. In such a world, every child's face always bears a smile.
That is not the "real" world we face these days, of course. Soon enough, the pandemic's menaces, the economic devastation, the drugs, the hunger, the abuse - all these and more will return to the forefront of our daily routine.
And when they do, they remind us that we can never live the dream fully, only pursue it. Still, the Christmas season reminds us that the aspiration is a worthy quest every day of the year.
It reminds us that each one of us, and each of our communities, is united by common threats and common goals and a shared reality, that each of us is as human as the other, all of us ornaments on the tree of life, as precious as any glass bulb passed down through the generations.
That is so true this year, when we have entered the Christmas season fatigued by a year-long worldwide event that has touched every life and every aspiration. If there is one silver lining to the pandemic, it has forced every person this year not just to call upon their own inner resources and unique skills and talents, but to embrace the power of what communities can accomplish when they unite.
John Lennon once asked, "And so this is Christmas and what have we done?" He wanted to know if we had protected the generations that follow us, or neglected them, like fallen angels. He wanted to know if we had worked hard enough for peace.
Perhaps the relevant question for this new year is not, what have we done? Perhaps the question this year is: And so this is Christmas, what shall we do?
To be sure, returning to our lives - all our lives, the way we lived them and wish to continue to live them - is so crucial now. Our children's education and futures, our society's mental and physical health, our economic viability and sustainability, all depend on what we do, not only as individuals but as a communities.
We can start by pledging to pick up and help all the fallen angels around us. We can start by reminding ourselves to be guided in our arguments and debates not by past impulses or overindulgences or personal grudges but by the promise of the Christmas season itself.
We can start by remembering that we are all in this together, and that the struggles we have faced this past year must not be allowed to wear us down: "And so this is Christmas, For weak and for strong, The rich and the poor ones, The war is so long."
It sure is. But, rich and poor, weak and strong, we can together win and thrive and prosper. Just a short cease fire in life the holidays can bring, but an important one. So, to each and all, as the song exhorts, have a very merry Christmas and a happier New Year.
Let's hope it's a good one without any fears.
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