Christmas is one of my favorite holidays. I like Nativity scenes and Christmas lights. I like giving presents to people I love and receiving presents from them. I like the excuse to cook elaborate dinners. I like Jack Skellington’s wonder at a snowflake, and Charlie Brown choosing the smallest Christmas tree, and Michael Caine’s deadly serious Scrooge, and Love Actually’s quixotic insistence that dramatic love confessions are a Christmas tradition.
I am an atheist. But one thing I like about the story of Christmas is that it is a story about hope. The world is terrible, the songs say, but now things are going to be better.
Light and life to all He brings
Risen with healing in His wings
Mild He lays His glory by
Born that man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of earth
Born to give them second birth
I believe neither in the efficacy of Jesus’s sacrifice nor in the fate he allegedly saved us from. But I do often feel the joy of “now things are going to be better”. And, you know, I do like many things said by this Jesus fellow. To quote another Christmas song I love:
We guard our world with locks and guns
And we guard our fine possessions
And once a year when Christmas comes
We give to our relations
And perhaps we give a little to the poor
If the generosity should seize us
But if any one of us should interfere
In the business of why they are poor
They get the same as the rebel Jesus
One of my favorite essays, by George Orwell, is about Christmas. The whole thing is worth a reread, but I’ll just quote one of my favorite passages:
At the risk of saying something which the editors of Tribune may not endorse, I suggest that the real objective of Socialism is not happiness. Happiness hitherto has been a by-product, and for all we know it may always remain so. The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood. This is widely felt to be the case, though it is not usually said, or not said loudly enough. Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue.
Socialist thought has to deal in prediction, but only in broad terms. One often has to aim at objectives which one can only very dimly see. At this moment, for instance, the world is at war and wants peace. Yet the world has no experience of peace, and never has had, unless the Noble Savage once existed. The world wants something which it is dimly aware could exist, but cannot accurately define. This Christmas Day, thousands of men will be bleeding to death in the Russian snows, or drowning in icy waters, or blowing one another to pieces on swampy islands of the Pacific; homeless children will be scrabbling for food among the wreckage of German cities. To make that kind of thing impossible is a good objective. But to say in detail what a peaceful world would be like is a different matter.
May those of us who celebrate Christmas take this holiday as an opportunity to recommit to building a world in which human beings love one another. From a heathen and a pagan on the side of the rebel Jesus: Merry Christmas.