Introduction
As I got older, I noticed that Christmas was also about something else: excruciating stress, exhaustion, and emotional trauma. First all the wearisome toil of buying, selling, and sending; then on the day itself, bickering, tears, and jealousy. As C. S. Lewis wrote, “You have only to stay over Christmas with a family who seriously try to ‘keep’ it . . . to see that the thing is a nightmare. . . . They are in no trim for merry-making . . . they look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.”4 In retrospect, this seems inevitable. What else would happen when you take a spiritually dead holiday and force everyone to treat it like it’s the center of their lives? And yet . . . every year, from time to time, there were the moments of joy. And I mean a really unique joy—a special kind of joy that nothing else in our whole lives ever compared with. It was a transcendent experience. The explosive moment might come at any time, in any place. This unexplained phenomenon is something I never actually noticed at the time. I didn’t notice the difference between this kind of joy and the rest of the whole Christmas package. To me, the greedy pleasure of getting presents, the feeling of uplift from the rituals of moral affirmation, and the moments of explosive joy were all one thing. In retrospect, however, I can clearly see how different they were. Here’s the key: the moments of special joy all had one thing in common. They were always prompted by cultural artifacts associated with Christmas that expressed a truly Christian, Jesuscentered spiritual celebration. Songs, cards, stories, images; strictly formal or loosely casual; old standbys and recent creations—it was always something that some Christian had made by taking the joy of God in Christ that he had personally experienced in the power of the Holy Spirit and then embodying it in a cultural form. I have an especially vivid memory of one year. I must have been something like ten. I ran around the house, leaping from room to room, belting out “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and “Joy 20