In the days following Christmas, it is almost natural to find our mood something like that of the brilliant lights we have just unplugged. Guests go home. Decorations come down. Celebrations cease. Life resumes with a little less fanfare perhaps. Reminding me even of things I hadn’t considered, the poet W.H. Auden describes the letdown of Christmas almost too well:

Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,

Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes…

There are enough left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week—

Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,

Stayed up so late, attempted—quite unsuccessfully—

To love all of our relatives, and in general

Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again

As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed

To do more than entertain it as an agreeable

Possibility, once again we have sent Him away…

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,

And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware

Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension…(1)

For Auden, in the days after Christmas, we step down from the heights of the holiday and along with our colored lights return to dimmer realities: daily life and its monotony, despairing headlines, another year of wearisome failures, blind spots and missteps. Writing in 1942, Auden’s sense of the dismal reality of life after Christmas was likely heightened by the uncertainties of war and the certainty of violence. For many, Christmas indeed serves as a moment of respite in the midst of harsher realities that promise to recommence. For others, the season itself is disheartening and the aftermath is more of the same. Regardless, the picture W.H. Auden paints is one in which many can enter.

Yet Auden’s attempt to describe life after Christmas is more than an offer of depressing, cynical poetry. For Auden, we must come down from the heights of Christmas in order to embrace again the world in all of its brokenness and finitude, in order to truly receive the Child whose arrival was not marked by lights and decoration but the slaughter of the innocents at Herod’s orders and the attention of a few outsiders in an unknown stable in a rural town. Auden reminds us that the time after Christmas is the time when Christ can step into the thick of our lives as he intended. Writes Auden:

To those who have seen

The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,

The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.

In the countercultural Christmas story that sits quiet and unassuming beside the holiday rush toward a peak event in December, Christmas day is not the end point. In the ancient Christian tradition, Christmas day was only the beginning of Christmas, marking a celebration that that lasted twelve days. The ancient church recognized that what happened on that quiet, dark night in Bethlehem could not be easily received. They needed twelve days to receive the mystery that might otherwise be overlooked, sentimentalized, or relegated to background music: Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing. O Come, let us adore him.

In the bleak moments of late winter, Christmas is not anti-climactic; it confronts us all the more. It was precisely into a dark and uncertain, dismal and post-festive reality that the Child came near in the first place. Christmas is the startling reminder that God has not forgotten, though in the thick of our rush and routine, our despairing headlines and blinding self-interest, we may have overlooked or forgotten the Child. Yet here, in the quiet and empty days after celebrations have ceased, the sights and sounds of God appearing among us can better be noticed and more intentionally received. If Advent brings the world’s attention to the sounds of one who stands at the door and knocks, and Christmas day marks the culmination of that knocking in the cry of a newborn king, the days thereafter usher us further into the presence of a God who not only knocks and draws near, but has opened wide the doors of the kingdom that he might be met face to face.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) W.H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1991), 399.

 

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