I confess that Christmas decorations move me. The sparkling snowmen with carrot noses, miniatures of Kris Kringle and his plummy wife, reindeer bucking for flight, glitzy icicles, and frozen scenes in snow
globes. As I’ve aged, I’ve become more emotional over those things. It’s a pleasant sadness, a yearning for something beyond the decor, something the decorations represent.
In part, the decorations are emblems of my past, of a time when Christmas was filled with childhood enchantment. Christmas involved flying reindeer, talking snowmen, whispering snowdrifts, hammering elves, and an omniscient, philanthropic cookie-addict from the unsearchable region known as The North Pole. And now that I know better, I can spot the marketing ploys that pull on the childhood nostalgia of middle-aged guys like me who can afford to buy one more set of Christmas gnomes. Sure, I see what’s going on in this commercialized Christmas enterprise, but I’m not above the feelings stirred by artifacts from a magical past.
My depth of emotion, however, suggests more than nostalgia. Holiday charms offer both a portal to a magical past as well as a projection to an inevitable future. The decorations, which keep appearing year after year, remind me that time is passing. I’m a year older each time. How many more Christmas seasons will I have? It’s not just that my childhood has passed, but that my life is passing. Time doesn’t simply replace the soaring magical flights of Santa Claus with my last-minute trips to the store; it replaces me. My life here is a track in a snowstorm. Even our decorations sometimes outlast us: I still use several tree ornaments passed down from my grandparents. Perhaps my grandchildren will treasure them also. One of the gifts that Christmas always gives me is the bittersweet reminder that time wins.
I sense the deepest pull I experience over Christmas decorations is a theological one. My yearning for youth and my recoiling at death point to the eternal city of God. I’m a traveler who is on the way to a better country where time has met its end, and death is defeated. The king of that country has decreed
that it can only be entered as a child, and that life there can never be lost by the aged. Perennial health, joy, and celebration abound in that realm. Perhaps the connection between an annual Christmas and an eternal Kingdom is clearer to my heart than my head. The child-like wonder aroused by gifts, lights, songs, and sweets isn’t a function of my intellect, but of my desire, more like homesickness than anything else. Those teary moments walking Aisle 14 with its glittering angels, cinnamon-spiced firs, and miniature village scenes surface bittersweet longings from within the already-and-not-yet for The Eternal Day of giving and receiving, feasting and playing, healing and singing.