On its face, the question posed in my title is absurd. We all know what Christmas is, the celebration of the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
I've said this before in various forms, but what gives Christmas resonance for me is the turn of the seasons—even living, as I do, in Florida where the seasons never turn. Christmas is the point when, as Steven Moffat put it in the Doctor Who story "A Christmas Carol," we are "halfway out of the dark." In the winter, the nights grow longer and the cold grows deeper, but we come together with family and loved ones to celebrate the fact that we are holding out against the cold, that we are making it into the promise of the new year. As Merle Haggard put it, "if we make it through December," that's something worth celebrating.
It's for this reason, I think, that the best Christmas stories and music always have those tinges of sadness to them. Last year, I wrote up five of my favorite Christmas albums, and more than one of them has a melancholy tone to them. I particularly like the work of Sting on his album If on a Winter's Night... and all three Christmas albums released by Over the Rhine. My favorite Christmas movie is It's a Wonderful Life, which is all about loss even if it is also about triumph.
It's a metaphor, of course. Christmas is the time that we celebrate our triumphs in the face of our losses, and the families and communities that let us experience them. I had a really tough year in some ways, but by December, I felt like I was getting through it, with the help of my wife and my kids and my friends who were there for me.
One of the songs on Sting's albums is called "Soul Cake"; it's about the English tradition of "soulling," where children and the poor go door-to-door offering to say prayers for the souls of the dead, in exchange for cookies called "soul cakes." I guess this is more of a Samhain tradition than a Christmas one, but it's still got that winter feeling, of thinking about our losses and pushing back against them together.
I've loved this song since I picked up the album back in 2021, but this year I finally did something I've been meaning to do for a while, and make the soul cakes. (This is the recipe I ended up using.) The Saturday morning after finals week, we decorated the tree we'd picked up the previous weekend. Then, I spent late morning baking while my kids played and my wife got work done and the Christmas music played on my soon-to-be-dead iPod. I don't usually bake, to be honest, but I found it very satisfying. That evening, my older kid and I went to my department's board game night, and we shared the soul cakes I had made. I had a good day—I was the happiest I'd been in a while.
I don't think I am in the clear yet... but I do feel like I am "halfway out of the dark." That's what Christmas is.
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