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Just Another Essay



Winter Solstice and the True Meaning of Christmas

Essay Posted December 25, 2005 by James E. Nelson

It was the afternoon of Dec. 20 (the day before winter solstice) and I was driving north from Worthington to St. Joseph, Minnesota, a small town to the west of St. Cloud. Although the sun had poked through several times earlier in the day (when I was still in Iowa), it was now overcast. Snow cover had become the norm rather than the exception. Because southwest Minnesota is farm country, nearly all the ground is tilled. As a result the snow was only broken by the occasional wind break or farm house. It was a nearly endless scene of dingy white and gray.

This is the season so well described in the first stanza of Christina Rosetti’s beloved poem, In the Bleak Midwinter.

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

In Alaska I loved the winters because the crystal white snow covered the dingy and ragged scrub brush and highlighted the utterly fantastic natural features of the landscape. Winter was Alaska’s glory. In summer much of the river plains of central Alaska were (truth be told) quite ugly in their own endearing way. Of course the great mountain ranges always rose above those perma-frosted plains and that made it easy to forget the shabby looking trees trying to survive here and there. But the simple fact was that the very far north stopped being summer-beautiful somewhere in central British Columbia. The very far north was only truly beautiful after the snow fell and lakes froze solid.

But the natural (or unnatural) scene of southwest Minnesota and north central Iowa are rather different. There is little or nothing left that is truly natural in this area. The land has been flattened, cleared and tilled. In the summer it is endless miles of crops. In the winter, after the crops are harvested, it becomes endless miles of snow with little to interrupt the dreary sameness of human ingenuity gone dormant.

This (and not the majestic Alaska landscape) is the scene of Christina Rossetti’s poem.

We often think of sin as a rupture . . . a tearing . . . a violent destruction . . . of the create order. I am of the school of thought that the most enduring and frightening forms of sin and evil are banal and largely unremarkable. Sin has the ability to take the truly remarkable created order and reduce it to an unremarkable sameness and uniformity. While not the most striking image of evil in the modern world, the most insightful images of evil are the unimaginative, gray, and lonely lines of square block buildings that were the hallmark of Communist controlled Russia and East Germany. Americans managed to be a bit more colorful, but aspired to the same levels unimaginative lack of creativity in its acres of suburban cookie cutter houses still being erected by the millions and immortalized in Malvina Reynold’s poem turned into a 60s pop song.

Little boxes on the hill side, little boxes made of ticky-tacky.
Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.

And this was essentially the same oppressive scene that I was driving straight into on the eve of Winter Solstice. It was a great, gray, nothingness above and below interrupted by a ribbon of highway and the occasional farmhouse insulated from other farmhouses by a cold and lonely distance magnified by the dingy snow and gray clouds. This was not the glorious winter of human imagination, but rather the reality of midwinter bleakness months after of truly glorious Spring of Creation’s song, the Summer of perfect fellowship of God and Eden and the heady Fall of self-directed apple eating and empty hopes of becoming like gods.

And it is into this precise scene that God once again wrested control of a glorious creation now gone flat, uninteresting, banal, and gray. I think Christina Rossetti got it a bit wrong in her beloved poem. Heaven and earth–in their original glory–do indeed reflect God’s true being. What she describes is not heaven and earth, but heaven and earth under the dominion of unimaginative and sinful human control:

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God: Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, Whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, Whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

As I drove north from Worthington to St. Joseph, the visible scene may have been one of bleak midwinter, but the glory of the scene, the true beauty, lay not in the vast emptiness of land years-tilled to a tedious sameness, but in the interactions of people hidden behind the curtained windows of the occasional farmhouse. Human hubris and the grandiose plans of human betterment and self-control may have transformed the creation-scape into the evil of blandness. But God doesn’t respond with some grandiose counter-attack of morality and goodness, God rather seeps into the cracks and fissures that exist in the obsidian hardness and blackness of human pride. Midwinter may be “hard as iron and the water like a stone,” but God is the interaction of newborn and mother in the secret warmth of hearth and cradle behind the shuddered windows.

Tomorrow may be solstice, but the next day will be minutes longer, as will the day after that. It may grow colder for another month or two, but there’s a trickle of ice melt deep within the heart of creation that has already begun. For now it is small and imperceptible. For now the bland sameness of bleak midwinter reigns, but deep within the bowels of a broken and frozen world, the “deep mystery” (to use a phrase from C. S. Lewis [see footnote]) of a new Spring thaw, an eighth day new creation, a transformation of human brokenness is already at work.

Our culture, always trying to make the best of a bad thing, has transformed the spirit of Christmas to a seasonal politeness, momentary acts of goodness for a month or so, a smile and greeting in a situation that would have produced a grunt a month or so ago. Such acts of goodness are a good thing. They point to the reality that we humans are indeed made in the image of God. But this is not the spirit of Christmas; it’s only a dim, gray, and hazy reflection of the true spirit of Christmas. The true spirit of Christmas is this “deep mystery” that is at work, that is beyond our control. It is God once again taking control of a once glorious creation that has now gone blandly awry. It is the nearly imperceptible thaw and transformation that can only be recognized by those with eyes to see and ears to hear. This is the true spirit of Christmas.

FOOTNOTE

Lewis actually uses the phrase “deep magic” (it's from The Narnia Chronicles) but we Americans are much more queasy about the term “magic” than the British, so I softened the phrase a bit.