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Merry Christmas!
12/25/2003

The significance of Christmas apart from the gift-opening, Santa Claus, Christmas movies, malls, day off aspect that had been its entirety throughout most of my life is finally beginning to settle in, several years after I scrambled my way to Catholicism.

I still remember the Christmas when it no ceased to feel like Christmas when I was a child. Up until that year, my mother's side of the family had gathered at my grandparents' house in Bennington, Vermont. A half-dozen adults, five children, a visit from Santa Claus after dinner, snow (often). But then Pops and his second wife began going down to Florida for the winter, and my parents and I had began having Christmas in New Jersey, sometimes (but not always) with my father's parents or uncles, aunts, and cousins from his side of the family.

The Christmas spirit disappeared a year or two later. I had just turned my bike onto Valley Rd., headed toward my friend Cliff's house, and it was a crisp, gray day. The roads were quiet. And I thought to myself, "Well, this feels just like any other day."

Until now.

Perhaps part of the increase in feeling has to do with my being a father, myself, now, with a daughter finally old enough to get excited about presents. However, more of it has to do with the sense that I'm beginning — at last — to understand the larger significance of the day.

Today, we recall that moment, over 2,000 years ago, when hope was squeezed from the womb. A hope so huge that it applies to every human being ever born. If God could bless us with such a hope — birthed so humbly, with so little pomp; quietly, as it were, among a half-dozen people (or so) and some animals — then how can we not have hope for the coming year, and the one after that, and after that, stretching out for eternity, even as we pass our own Christmas days quietly?

I had the good fortune to read these words, from Zephaniah 3, at Mass a couple of weeks ago:

Shout for joy, O daughter Zion!
Sing joyfully, O Israel!
Be glad and exult with all your heart,
O daughter Jerusalem!
The LORD has removed the judgment against you

he has turned away your enemies;
the King of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst,
you have no further misfortune to fear.
On that day, it shall be said to Jerusalem:
Fear not, O Zion, be not discouraged!
The LORD, your God, is in your midst,
a mighty savior;
he will rejoice over you with gladness,
and renew you in his love,
he will sing joyfully because of you,
as one sings at festivals.

Rejoice, because God rejoices over you. No matter how you pass the day, you pass it in the Christmas light of His gift to you.

And I pass my day in the light of your gift to me. Thank you for reading.

Merry Christmas!

Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:43 AM EST