We’re in it now. Three weeks into Advent and the Christmas cards are starting to appear Scotch taped on office doors and on refrigerators. I love Christmas cards, for a couple of reasons: One, I think I have a strange sentimentality for traditional mail. “Write letters if you want letters,” my mother used to say. She always wrote letters: to Bounty paper towels for creating such a wonderful product (no joke!); to the grape industry in the 70s to let them politely know that as long as they were mistreating their laborers she wouldn’t be buying their product; and to each of her congressmen for basically not being in her political party. Letters and cards say a lot about us—what we care about—our eccentricities. That’s the real reason I think I love this season of postage.
Photos of children wearing matching sweaters, family pets wearing matching sweaters — the family Christmas card says so much. In an ironic twist, the thing it says absolutely least about is the actual Holy Family. It’s true! Don’t get me wrong — there are some stunning images of the Holy Family, especially on cards, but in beautifying them we’ve also sanitized them and their struggle. We forget how absolutely shocking the story really is! Instead of a young, poor, ethnic couple holding the Son of God, outcaste immigrants on the fringes of society, we are offered often white, healthy looking older people who literally glow in the dark. I thought stables would be a little dark.
Berating the commercialization of Christmas in America is a platitude; it is now an American holiday, as ubiquitous as Fourth of July barbecues and Labor Day sales. That’s not my concern. My concern is that I think we’ve sanitized the story of the Holy Family in our Church. I’m all for keeping Christ in Christmas and Santa second, but I think we’ve turned Christ, Joseph and Mary into impossible symbols of the holidays that, as Fr. James Martin, SJ says, “We can’t imitate them, and if we can’t imitate our heroes and saints we tend to ignore them.” (On Being, December 4, 2016). If St. Joseph looked less like a loving grandfather and more like the young man in his thirties, berated by the joys and pressures of having to raise a young family, I know I’d relate more. Are we to think that this young couple didn’t have one screaming match on the road to Bethlehem? Imagining they did encourages me to continue on the road of faith with my fiancé.
My hero, Dorothy Day, once said, “Don’t call me a saint, I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.” On one level, that is a perfect Dorothy Day quote. She’s fiery with great New York attitude, but she’s also on to something. She knew that when we view the saints as superheroes rather than as everyday sinners who persisted in their faith, we can scrub them clean of their humanity. So, let us look back on that little family that looked forward to us because — well — they are us.
I’ll be seeing you,
Elliot