Christmas and family

WORDS Fr Andrew Hamilton SJ and Jenny Myers

In Australia at Christmas time, some people think of Jesus, others don’t. Christmas is a festival for all of us. The Australian Christmas, too, is mostly a festival of the family. We give presents to family and friends on Christmas day, send greetings to cousins who live a long way away, welcome some relatives to our Christmas dinner, visit others during the day, and finally go off on family holidays in the days afterwards. For Catholics, our family Christmas may include going to Midnight Mass and singing carols. When we think of Christmas, we are invited to think both of the first Christmas and of what we value as families. In this edition of Explorations, we shall explore how Christmas and families come together.

Experiences of Christmas

Christmas, for many of us, is a time for recognising those we care for, and often involves reaching out to people outside the traditional family circle. It is a time for parties, when workmates and friends celebrate together as a happy family. We also think of the postmen, garbage collectors and others who serve the family. Some of us may spend a bit of time on Christmas day helping prepare meals for those in need, and give money to appeals for the homeless and sick children who must spend Christmas in hospital.

For most Australians, Christmas is a very busy and harried time. Advertisers shout for our money, appeals for money arrive every day, children keep reminding us of their wish-list of presents, shops are crowded, there is a party every night, cards have to be sent, Santa Claus to be visited, and work to be finished before the holidays. There are not enough hours in the day.

Christmas is a festival for all Australians. But few Australians are church-going Christians. So the season has largely lost its association with Jesus Christ. When surrounded by Santa Claus, fake snow, reindeers, bells and holly, even Christians have to remind themselves that Christmas remembers Jesus’ birth. We find it hard to find space to reflect and wonder at God’s goodness to us in joining us in this fragile baby.

Some Christians try to reclaim Christmas as a Christian feast. They want to put back Christ into Christmas. They encourage us to use Christmas cards with pictures of the crib rather than Santa’s sleigh, and to focus on the family rather than accepting the commercial values of partying on, pigging out and buying expensive presents.

For many people, Christmas is not a happy time. If we are separated from our families, without money, with only bitter memories of our own family life, or lonely and with a deep sense of failure, the images of happy and prosperous families can make Christmas a lonely and painful time. It reminds us of what we have missed.

The first Christmas   

The way we celebrate Christmas echoes the stories of Jesus’ birth. But the stories in the gospels can also make us think about Christmas in fresh ways.

The stories of Jesus’ birth in the gospels of Luke and Matthew are good news, something to celebrate. They are carefully told to introduce the good news of the whole gospel. They describe a God who comes into our broken world to rescue it and make it whole. This is surprising good news that we could not anticipate. In Matthew’s Gospel, Joseph is surprised. The fiancé of a young woman who is expecting a baby that is not his own, he discovers that this is God’s doing. Luke makes the surprise Mary’s. She hears that she will have a baby, even though she has not had sexual relations. The reader is also surprised to discover that God will come to save us through this helpless baby.

When we have surprising good news, we always want to celebrate it. The Christmas stories are stories of celebration that God comes for all human beings. It is natural that Christmas should continue to be a time for celebrating. The first Christmas stories, too, invite to the celebration holy angels and yobbo peasants, Jewish believers and wise men of other faiths. So, it’s natural that all Australians should celebrate Christmas in their own way.

The Christmas stories in the gospels are also about giving. God gives, and we respond. God’s gift is himself—Jesus will change our world forever and make us children of God. The gifts people give are simply ways of saying thank you. The most precious ones are the unseen movements of their hearts. When Mary hears the good news, she simply says yes. When Joseph has his dreams, he follows them. Shepherds come to see. The wise men bring gifts in which they recognise the gift that Christ is to the whole world. The meaning of Christmas is still expressed in small gifts of ourselves.

Matthew’s and Luke’s stories are stories of a family. God joins us in the domestic life of a simple family. In Matthew’s Gospel, the three wise men, traditionally kings, are bit players—the main act is Mary and Joseph and the baby before whom they kneel. Christmas continues to be a feast of families, and especially children. It blesses the simple joys and commitments of coming together as a family.

But this is not an ordinary family. Their values and experiences challenge our own. Matthew’s Joseph is initially perplexed because Mary has become pregnant to someone else. Later he has to arrange the family’s escape to Egypt as asylum seekers. In Luke’s Gospel, Joseph also suddenly becomes a foster father. The family cannot find decent accommodation, so Jesus is born in a stable, with rough shepherds for company. Later, the young Jesus scares his family out of their mind by staying behind in Jerusalem, and is quite unrepentant for the anxiety he causes them.

This picture is quite unlike the popular image of a perfect family: perfect mother, father and children, whose engagement and marriage are deliriously happy, who soon have a nice home and car, never quarrel, and whose children are cute, popular, and have the best of educations before their successful career. By these standards, Jesus’ family seems almost dysfunctional. Their lives take them to the edge of society rather than to its centre. They are confronted with the messy reality that all human beings meet. We can identify with them, whether we live in a happy, stable family, whether our family is broken, we live singly, or are separated from those whom we love, whether we see ourselves as respectable or as losers.

The most notable thing about the family in the Christmas stories is that they are not the focus. Jesus’ family itself is concerned with bigger things. The Good News of the Gospel takes Mary and Joseph to see surprisingly different people and places. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’ first visitors are animals and shepherds. In Matthew’s Gospel, he is rushed away to Egypt and lives there among foreigners until it is safe for him to return. The family travels without complaint because they know that in Jesus God has not simply blessed families, but has brought good news to the poor. In Mary’s song, she describes the good news as the proud being put in their place and the humble being given a high place. The God who chooses people takes their attention off their own spiritual needs, and makes them look outwards to God and to the poor of their world.

When we celebrate Christmas as Australians we keep something of this perspective. People give generously to appeals by the Red Cross, the Children’s Hospitals and the Salvos because they still see Christmas as a time to look beyond themselves and their own families, to the poor who need to hear good news. Christmas turns our eyes to the real world in which we live, in which God loves all human beings, especially the most desperate.

Yet in one way, at least, the mood of the Australian Christmas seems different from that of the first Christmas. The Australian Christmas is frantic and full of expectations. We can feel let down if we don’t enjoy ourselves, celebrate, have happy family gatherings, receive good presents, and go on great holidays. Advertising and stories in the media always paint a bright picture of Christmas. When Christmas does not meet these high expectations, we can feel great disappointment and loneliness.

In both Luke’s and Matthew’s stories, the characters have times when they are anxious and hurried. We can imagine what it would be like to travel by foot for a census, to seek accommodation when about to give birth, to escape soldiers that are trying to kill our child. But the heart of the stories is not the haste, but space. They invite us to dream, to wonder, to store memories in our hearts. No matter how busy they are, the participants are aware of the deeper significance of what is happening. That frees them from the burden of high expectations that things should go well. Although churches emphasise this contemplative aspect of Christmas, it is largely lost in the broader Australian celebration. Even people of deep Christian faith find it hard to remain attentive to God’s presence.

Celebrating Christmas

Christ has not gone from the Australian Christmas. The first Christmas colours the way Australians celebrate at Christmas time. Even those who neither believe in nor think of Christ emphasise celebration, generosity, family, hearts open to the less privileged. These are traces left by Christian faith in Australian culture. We may recognise them and be grateful for them. It will be valuable to make the story of Christ more visible at Christmas. We shall be adding something precious, not putting value back into something that has no value without it.

We do not need to put Christ back into Christmas. He is already there. But it is important for us to bring Christmas back to Christ. Some aspects of the way we celebrate Christmas in Australia are in conflict with the gospel stories of the first Christmas.

The way we think about families sometimes leads us to separate good from bad families. This is reflected in our expectations of what Christmas should be like. But the stories of the first Christmas measure families by their humanity and by their need. They value people over wealth and respectability. They invite us to look particularly at the people who have reason to be unhappy at Christmas—those separated from their families, those who have grown up without stable families to steady their lives, and without resources to feed and care for their families. To care for families from this perspective invites us to model our society on the Good News of Jesus.

This means particularly shaping the way in which we Australians work and spend money to strengthen families, especially those who are most broken. This implies respect for life and for the structure of marriage between men and women. It means providing working hours and conditions that enable families to meet and nurture one another. It also means encouraging the respect and solidarity in the workplace that fosters cooperative and not competitive values in the home. Family values also include shaping an immigration policy that makes it easy for immigrants and asylum seekers to be reunited with their families.

For Christians, Christmas is about Jesus. It is a time for reflection as well as for celebration, for deepening faith as well as values. Christmas reminds us that the value of human beings to God does not depend on what they have or how they appear. For us it is important to keep Christmas focused on Christ, and the good news that Christmas is for ourselves and for the world.

Questions for reflection

1. How do you celebrate Christmas day?

2. Do you find time to think of the first Christmas?

3. Do you find Christmas a happy time? Do you know people who find it an unhappy time?

4. What do you see as the main message of Jesus’ birth?

5. How can we help our society appreciate the message of the first Christmas?

Resources

Buy Nothing Christmas:

www.buynothingchristmas.org