River News: Our View

The Christmas season arrives every year with its stubborn insistence, quite like the sudden ringing of a bell on a quiet street, stopping us in our tracks to take a look around. 

It reminds us, with its cold weather and warm beverages, its white snow and bright lights, its soft carols and bold resolutions, to put a hold on the calendar for a few weeks or a month or so.

It reminds us to live.

We stop. We look around. We embrace the ones we love. We enjoy watching the parades and Santa, and maybe, just maybe, a football game or two. Ah, you think as the last days of the year tick by, I haven’t spoken with Sarah in so long, and when she picks up the phone with that delightful voice of friendship and intimacy, you know the magic of Christmas has arrived.

Her words, the words of all our friends, ring out in December with a jingle of cheer; there is such serenity in the syllables of this season that no one can truly be a grinch, at least not for long.

The children, too, in the season’s excitement, take us back to the elations of our own childhoods. We help them decorate the tree and add new ornaments — decorative odes to Christmas’s past and future — the smell of the fir tickling a sneeze up inside us. Add the marvels of tinsel and hot cocoa, and you just know to ask: How can there not be a God, with such sweetness all around?

Christmas reminds us to remember what really matters. For most of us, it is a season of warmth, reunion, and ritual. It is also the springboard to renewal. Its good feelings take our hearts and minds to new perches, to a place atop the mountains of the earth where a mortal soul just might take flight and find new adventures. 

Inevitably, too, Christmas is a season lived in the confines of the world around us. We can never escape our moment, which is why the best advice has always been to live in it. Still, there is inescapable tragedy, and evil lurking among us. For many, it is a season sharpened by absence. The chairs of loved ones are occupied by veritable strangers, the voices of those we miss greet us only in memory. 

And yet, Christmas is about embracing all of them, and all their dreams and hopes, too.

This year, more than most, it seems, Christmas shoulders the possessions, spiritual and tangible, of those who did not make it to the doorstep of its day. 

It is a truism to say that we cannot speak honestly of Christmas without speaking of loss, not merely the loss of those we know but of those whose names and faces we have never known and never will. Indeed, the Nativity itself is a story in an age of deprivation and loss, narrated by violence and exile. Jesus marched from his birth to his mortal death in tumult and betrayal, and yet managed to blaze a trail to redemption. 

From its beginning, Christmas has insisted that hope and salvation cannot wait for ideal conditions. Women and men must persevere in an always-hard life, lest the very seed of tomorrow’s hopes and dreams surrender to despair. Those people lost this year — through accident, violence, illness, or age — carried with them the seeds of their hopes and dreams. Their lives were not obsolete punctation marks but lead paragraphs in our nation’s story. Their dreams might have been unfinished and unrealized, perhaps, but their’s were narratives only interrupted, not chapters finished.

Hope and inspiration drove the unfaltering crusade of the larger-than-life Charlie Kirk, who catalyzed a movement to build a better world. Likewise, the movies of Rob Reiner, who used love, friendship, and family to summon us all to a more harmonious place, and to open the doors to the great possibilities of humanity. 

So too for the innocent and still developing hopes and dreams of the children of racing great Greg Biffle and his wife, all of whom died in a horrific plane crash this past week. And for the students whose promising lives were cut short by evil at Brown University.

These are the headline tragedies, but, more than that, they are the wrapping paper for the thousands and thousands of tragedies we never hear a word about. We must always remember that the round-the-clock calamities we consume as news on the internet are merely placeholders for so many more that never register in the public domain.

Only through such continued cognizance can the Christmas season come alive with its promises. The moral challenge Christmas places before us is not merely to mourn all these people, but to refuse the idea that their striving ends in silence. Meaning is not extinguished by death unless we abandon it ourselves.

Arthur Schopenhauer warned the world about short-sightedness: “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world,” he wrote. “This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets us fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet.”

We shall never know where heaven and earth meet, but we must never mistake the limits of our vision for the limits of the world, Schopenhauer wanted us to know. Christmas pushes back against that error. It asks us to lift our eyes above the immediate horizon to understand that the world is more generous and human than our current headlines suggest.

We are, even now, extraordinarily blessed as a nation and a people. That truth survives despite war, division, and political secession. We live in a place where food is abundant, where protesting voices may yet shout out, where families may gather at will, and where belief itself remains protected. These blessings are our inheritance from all those who have left us.

They are, in a way, our Christmas presents. Let’s make sure we nourish what they have bequeathed us.

Look to the children on Christmas morning, and you will see something precious and instructive. They live, if briefly, unburdened by the anxieties we have normalized. Their joy is not transactional but imaginative. They intuitively understand that wonder is a renewable resource. When we step into their world, even momentarily, we recover something essential we were never meant to lose.

A society that forgets how to imagine beyond its horizons, to take wing toward the dreams that others sought but could not reach in time, cannot stay in the air very long. Those who died this year did not leave us detailed instructions or flight plans, but they did leave us the general direction. They aimed beyond themselves, beyond comfort, and toward something better. To honor them this Christmas is to continue their work, to push further than we otherwise would and to imagine more generously than convenience allows.

So let us set our sights beyond the old horizon. Let us refuse the lie that nothing can change. Let us give thanks not as an ending but as a beginning. And let us live in such a way that those who did not make it to Christmas this year are remembered not only in grief but in purpose.

From all of here to all of you this season, here’s wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, and clear sailing beyond tomorrow’s horizon.