All My People Died at Christmas

When I was a child, my grandmother died three days before Christmas. We buried her on Christmas Eve. Years later, my little brother fell asleep at the wheel driving home from college to spend the holidays with family. He hit a tree and died instantly. And years after that, I miscarried my first baby in a taxicab passing the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.

The irony of so many goodbyes at a season reserved for celebrating the most important arrival ever was entirely lost on me. Despite being a wholly devoted follower of Jesus, I had never once celebrated Christmas as the birth of Christ.

This is weird. I know it’s weird because I’ve since made friends with Baptists and Presbyterians and Anglicans, and when I explain my dearth of Christmas praxis, they all look at me like I’m insane. But if it wasn’t explicitly laid out as a command in the pages of the New Testament, my childhood church didn’t practice it. And as the apostle Paul does not appear to have celebrated Christmas, we were definitely not celebrating Christmas.

This meant that my preacher didn’t call out Jesus’ birth in sermons except as a caveat: “And as we all know, the Bible doesn’t mention when Jesus was born.” We did not sing Christmas songs in church. When “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” played on the radio, my brother and I changed the lyrics from “Remember Christ our Savior / Was born on Christmas Day” to “Remember Christ our Savior / Wasn’t born on Christmas day.” Every time we did it, we felt like Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the Castle Church door.

Sometimes my family would get Christmas cards from well-meaning friends, with nativity scenes or angels on their fronts. Holding a card like that was like holding a dirty magazine, like contraband snuck in from a fallen world. We prayed these card-senders would come to their senses.

So no Jesus at Christmas. But Santa, reindeer, cookies, and Christmas lights were fair game.

We didn’t think God was less “with us” at Christmas than at other times of the year—just not especially with you. God is equally with us every day. No need to privilege one over another.

When life was easy, this understanding of omnipresence made sense to me. But losing all my people at Christmas made me wonder. Some days, God felt distinctly less with me than on other days. And some days (maybe not the days I’d most expect) God felt especially present.

In her book Thermal Delight in Architecture, architect Lisa Heschong writes that “our nervous system is much more attuned to noticing change in the environment than to noticing steady states.” Humans derive greater pleasure from novelty. It’s why we love the first few days of a new season (snow!) and abhor the lingering last days of that very same season (more snow). It’s why we like to sit by a fire after a day skiing. It’s why we jump in cold water before the sauna. As Heschong explains, “the experience of each extreme is made more acute by contrast to the other.”

And yet, she notes, modern people have chosen a “steady state environment” as preferable for everyday life: We’ve collectively decided that “any degree of thermal stress is undesirable ” and expend significant effort and expense to eliminate it.

I grew up thinking of God’s presence like central heating, a steady state environment, no special days because every day is special. It turns out, the quickest way to forget that something is special is to make “special” ordinary and expected. As psychologist Richard Beck writes of reclaiming enchanted faith, “God is everywhere, but when He is everywhere, He tends to be nowhere.”

When my grandmother died, when my brother died, when I miscarried my baby, God’s presence didn’t feel much like easy oxygen (I could barely breathe) or reliable gravity (I felt like I was floating in space). It felt more like a friend walking through the door, turning on a lamp. It felt personal, particular, located, new.

Even children can tell you the details of the birth of Christ. Where was he born? In Bethlehem. Where did they lay him? In a manger. Who was there? His mother Mary. Joseph the carpenter. Shepherds came to see him. Magi from afar brought gifts.He was wrapped in swaddling clothes. The king, a particular historical king, Herod the Great (not Herod Antipas or Herod Agrippa) sought to kill him. The story is full of specifics. Why? Because it actually happened. And real things happen not in general but in particular.

Theologians call Jesus’ arrival in the form of a particular person, in a particular place, at a particular time, and among a particular culture “the scandal of particularity.”

At Christmas, God is not everywhere equally at once, evenly distributed in a state of constant homeostasis. He’s “here”—a body in a woman’s arms, apparent in a way he wasn’t only moments before. The arrival of Christ marks a transition: Something was wrong and then was made right. Something was less and then more. En-wombed and then birthed.

This is the way God chooses to express His steady presence—hidden then revealed, shrouded then unveiled, silent then loud, faith then sight.

I was seven when my grandmother died. I still remember looking into the yawning mausoleum, watching the coffin be pushed into darkness, weighing the impossible possibility of resurrection. It was Christmas Eve.

One year later, on Christmas Eve, I stood in our driveway in St. Petersburg, Florida, watching snowflakes fall like stars from a generous sky. I opened my mouth wide to catch them on my tongue. Fat flakes melted on my eyelashes and cheeks. I’d never seen snow. I’d never see it in St. Petersburg again. It seemed like God had deliberately gone out of his way to prove what the angel said to Mary: “Nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37, ESV throughout).

When my brother Bobby died, I’d never felt so lonely. He’d been my best friend. Something like 500 people came to his funeral—several ex-girlfriends, a few of his bosses, his third-grade teacher, and the entire men’s basketball team from his college. We told stories. We laughed. We sang. It was beautiful. A beautiful funeral shouldn’t be possible. But here it was, because here God was: “Immanuel,” which means God with us (Matt. 1:23).

And then the baby. We told that story to our church one year at Christmas, about how we’d waited for seven years to have a baby and then we lost him and all seemed lost. But even so, God was close and kind. Telling that story brought God close again, this time for people in the room who’d never heard another person tell a story about miscarriage. Sharing it felt like unzipping the sky and testifying, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy” (Luke 2:10).

Christmas reminds us of the breaking-in nature of divinity, of the way God steps into particular moments, making himself known in new, personal, special ways—like arriving in the City of David during the time of Herod the Great to a virgin mother. Like St. Petersburg on Christmas Eve, love carried on snowflakes, or in New York City in a taxi cab, Christmas lights reflecting on the hood of the car, or at the Church of Christ on Park Boulevard, the grieving saints singing all together, “They sing in heav’n a new song…”

Yes, God is everywhere. He “fill[s] heaven and earth” (Jer. 23:24). But Christmas is teaching me that God also comes to specific people at specific times in specific ways, sometimes in increased materiality or intensity. I’m learning it’s okay for some days to feel more special than others, because some days are—not because God’s here on some days and absent on others, but because, for whatever reason, God has chosen certain moments to find us with announcement, revelation, or adventure. They may not be the days we expect him. They may be when we least expect him: at funerals, in a hospital bed, on the anniversary of a loss, or in a manger.

I didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas as the birth of Christ, but I do now. I celebrate with candles and Nativity scenes and carols and Advent prayers. And I celebrate by leaving the door open, expecting Immanuel’s particular arrival.

J. L. Gerhardt is a Storytelling Partner at Hazefire Studios, author of The Goodness, and creator of the audio memoir The Happiest Saddest People.