Christmas and the Cold from Beyond the Edge of the World

Every year, I try to pick up a new Christmas album to add to my rotation. This year, spurred by a vague memory of a conversation with a friend, I chose Sting's 2009 Christmas album If on a Winter's Night... My wife was a bit skeptical: "Are you sure it was Sting he recommended!?" It doesn't have any of the Christmas standards on it: you'll find no "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" here, much less "Jingle Bells." Rather, it's mostly English folk songs and religious hymns, all Christmas- or winter-themed. 

Happily, I was right about my friend's recommendation, and happily also, it is a good album. It might lack those Christmassy standards, but it still feels like Christmas. For me, one of the key elements of Christmas is a feeling of cold and darkness, and Sting's album communicates that well with great tracks like "Balulalow." Christmas is the time of year when nights are at their longest, and the weather is at its coldest, and my favorite Christmas stories have a feeling of something dark and lonesome breaking through at the edge of the world. Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising is a good example of this: Christmas is the time when the world could be plunged into darkness and never emerge.

Yet it does always emerge. Of course, in a literal sense this is because the Earth keeps orbiting the sun, and the days gets longer and warmer. But it feels like it happens because of Christmas: we band together with our families and loved ones, and it pushed back the dark. That's what I like in Christmas stories, a sense that in coming together, we keep off the cold. It's the pleasure you get from wearing a heavy blanket in a cold room.

COVID is a long darkness if ever there was one within my lifetime. I keep thinking we're emerging from it, but it doesn't seem to be happening. In such a spirit of optimism, we're in Cleveland right now for the first time since Christmas 2019. Only, my wife's brother has been in and out of the ER for COVID, my wife's father and his wife have to isolate for COVID exposure and have shown symptoms, and one of my wife's other brothers tested positive... meaning we can't see him, nor his son—our newborn nephew.

It ought to be that in uniting with family we push back the darkness, but these days, uniting with family is the thing that can spread the darkness. In the horrible paradox of pandemic-era Christmas, I feel the threat uttered in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: always winter but never Christmas. I read that book many times as a child, but I don't think I really understood what it meant until now.