Christmas Stories

I wonder how many Christmas-themed stories have been told, written, or filmed over the last 2007 years. Two of the Gospels—Luke and Matthew—were the first, I suppose. But I haven’t a clue what might be the most recent. Even if you were just to count your favorites, I expect you’d find it a long list. And throughout the day today, you’ll be remembering more and more that you could add to the list. Movies, stories, TV specials, poems. Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, The Charlie Brown Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life, Clement Moore’s A Visit from Saint Nicholas (better known as ‘Twas the Night before Christmas), The Fourth Wiseman. I’ve been asking people about their favorites and have heard of several new ones including Harold and the Purple Crayon. What are yours? And there are even more stories that may not have explicit Christmas themes, but have come to be associated with Christmas time. I was doing some Googling. Somebody at Auburn University has compiled a list of movies that are in some way related to Christmas. There were 181 titles on the list.

Stories. Something about Christmas spawns stories. Again and again we seek to capture the spirit of Christmas by telling stories. The association between storytelling and this particular holiday seems striking. We read, write, watch stories as part of our celebration of Jesus’ birth. We enact infinite variations on the nativity story in Christmas pageants. Somehow we turn to stories and storytelling to help us find the meaning of Christmas. Some are retellings of the nativity story, but many, many more are not. They are not the Christmas story. But they are Christmas stories for us.

All of these stories and storytelling at Christmastime. I’m not sure what it means. Except to say that Christmas is something that has a plot. Christmas isn’t just an idea or a theory or an object or a past event or even just a day. Christmas is a plot that unfolds over time in human lives. It’s a plot with infinite variations, set in a wide range of times and places, involving all sorts of people. But it’s a plot lived by regular human beings, a story we could write ourselves into.

With a lot of holidays we ask the question: How do you observe Thanksgiving? New Years? We say that sometimes, too, of Christmas. How do you observe Christmas? Wondering whether you open presents on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day… whether you have a special meal or other family traditions. But all the stories… the stories we immerse ourselves in are not about observing a day, a holiday. They are about living the plot of Christmas.

Not all the Christmas stories have exactly the same plot, although I think many of the ones that really endure as classics do have common elements. They are personal journeys of discovery. TNT has recently been showing the Wizard of Oz. When I was growing up, back in the olden days when TV was only network TV and it came through the air, one of the networks used to show the Wizard of Oz once a year. It wasn’t at Christmas, was it? But it is, really, a classic Christmas story about Dorothy’s journey of discovery. The first part of that journey is learning what it is in life that is truly valuable. Learning that the superficial or selfish things that you thought you needed aren’t really worth so much after all. Dorothy makes that journey in a land called Oz accompanied by a scarecrow, tin man and lion. Scrooge, to take another familiar example, takes that same journey at night accompanied by the ghosts of Christmas past, Christmas present and Christmas yet to come.

So the first element in the plot of Christmas is learning that often the things we thought we could not live without don’t really mean much, and things like faith, hope, love and charity are worth more to us than life itself.

The second part of the Christmas plot is the discovery that these things that we truly need, these things like love, and faith and hope, these things that are profoundly valuable in life are already right there before us, given to us as gift. Think about Dorothy and Scrooge. Once we figure out what it is that really matters in life, we discover that it is ours already. Ours to receive as a gift, if we will but accept it.

And, of course, that is the Christmas story. The Christmas story is the story of humankind’s journey to awareness that what we cannot live without is a Savior. We need God’s redeeming love more than we need anything else. And, lo, if we make that first part of the journey, we also discover that our Savior has been given to us. Born this happy morning.

We often say that all these Christmas stories help teach us the true meaning of Christmas. I don’t think that’s it, really. I think they do something even much more important. These stories teach us that the true meaning of life is Christmas. The true meaning of life is Christmas. And that’s what Jesus’ birth brings us. Jesus’ birth into our world makes the Christmas story our life’s story. Tell the stories. They teach us that the plot of our lives, our own lives, is Christmas.