The Unholy Family of Christmas (Part 1)

Artists depict the holy family of Christmas on everything from cards to pieces hung in galleries. One pose that has may variations shows Joseph standing with a staff and looking over Mary’s shoulder. Both of them are focused on their newborn lying in a manger. The scene is iconic and conveys a holy hush.

Mothers and fathers everywhere are photographed similarly holding their newborn in adoration and quiet amazement at this new life now in their lives. Though these poses also hold a sense of the sacred, only Joseph, Mary, and Jesus are called “the holy family.”

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Unwrapping Christmas in a Different Paradigm: Fear or Fear Not? (4 of 5)

Joseph was in a fix. He’d been excited about his upcoming marriage to Mary, but she just told him she was pregnant. As Matthew tells the story, Joseph was a man who lived righteously—in a good way. If he made a big deal about how Mary says she got pregnant, he might save face in the community for himself, but Mary would then bear all the social disgrace. She could even be stoned. Even if she was allowed to live, she had no economic viability, being unmarried, pregnant, and a peasant teenager. Joseph couldn’t resolve his dilemma, caught in fears of violating either social expectations or his own sense of what was right. What to do?

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Unwrapping Christmas in a Different Paradigm: Mary's Song of Joy (2 of 5)

It’s widely known how Mary saw the Angel Gabriel and through him learned that she would conceive through the Holy Spirit, bear a son whom she was to name Jesus; that he would be “called the Son of the Most High,” given the throne of David, and that there would be no end to his kingdom. Wow! Imagine sitting still for that one!

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Merry Countercultural Christmas!

I enjoyed Christmas in its modern American form for the first twelve years of my life. Then, one year, at the age of 13, I had three Christmases to take part in. Having just been reunited with my mother’s side of my family after not knowing them for all those years, the newness of fitting into their Christmas in addition to that of my life at home, and again at my grandparents’ place, I was in Christmas heaven for a kid. Or so it would seem to someone reading the surface. That Christmas season of 1986 was the time when the special day, and the season that wrapped around it, broke. I was made to participate in all the tree selection, trimming, going to church, shopping, wrapping, and all that, but this time in multiple households, one of which was 100 miles away. That was the first crack in the wall for me, the first time the commercial Christmas overwhelmed me.

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Unwrapping Christmas in a Different Paradigm (1 of 5)

“We won’t be able to have much of a Christmas this year” are words that could come from millions this December. But it’s true only if Christmas equals buying and giving commercial gifts. It’s true only if the story of the malls is the true Christmas event.

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