Kananaskis Christmas

Kananaskis Country - Courtesy James Bernier

Consorting with the Reindeer - Courtesy James Bernier

Christmas Eve. Outside our window in the Delta Lodge in Kananaskis, a child is being photographed against a background of penned reindeer under the watchful eye of a six-foot elf. Santa is nowhere to be seen but I presume these reindeer are not HIS reindeer since getting them to fly to the North Pole before nightfall would be difficult.

Beyond the pen of reindeer and a spruce forest, a jagged mountain peak rises into a dark cloud; they say there’ll be snow tomorrow.

This is a great place to be; a comfortable lodge that welcomes kids and dogs, both of which have the run of the place. (Not quite true, actually; the dogs are on leashes.) We’ve met people for whom coming to Kananaskis for Christmas has become a longstanding tradition. A huge hot tub—half inside and half outside—is great just before bed. Cross-country skiing is not great; it’s too warm and the trails are icy. Luckily, we had no intention of skiing anyway. Earlier, we hiked past an outdoor rink where a rollicking hockey game was in progress, a skating oval just behind the lodge is busy all day and into the evening.

I remember Christmas in 1987 when Agnes and I took the train up to Oberammergau as a diversion from the emptiness of a Christmas far from home. It was like this place, this year: mountains in the background, snow melting in unseasonably warm temperatures, plenty of time and places to take long walks and marvel at the views. We’ve gone to Jasper for Christmas since, as well as to the spa in Moose Jaw. Seems being somewhere that’s not home is becoming a tradition for us. I wonder why that is.

In my experience, it’s not possible to “recreate,” to rejuvenate without leaving home. The old adage, out of sight, out of mind, applies here; everything you see, do and experience at home is a reminder of any stresses from which relief is wanted. The reindeer outside my window are no stressors whatsoever, especially now at five o’clock when they’ve nearly disappeared into the early dusk.

The upshot: you must go home for Christmas, and then you must go away. That, of course, makes no sense whatever.

I don’t know how you describe your experience of Christmas. I don’t mean when you were a kid and couldn’t wait to open your presents. I mean now, when you’ve passed all that, when you’ve long since ceased anticipating Santa Claus. For me, it’s become a much-needed sabbatical at exactly the right time of year, when the shortness of the days, the length of the nights threaten to dampen the spirit.

And it’s in this vein that I wish you all a wonderful, sabbatical Christmas with opportunity aplenty to put your tools and your anxieties aside for a few days, and to refresh your relationship with those you love, and with the vision we follow. The vision of which Christmas should be a reminder but, alas, is often more of a distraction.

Merry Christmas anyway, and a Happy New Year!

And now, it’s Christmas morning. The first cup of coffee is sweet. At 10:00, the hotel will lay on an enormous brunch buffet for us in the Olympic Ballroom and tonight, a “Traditional Christmas Dinner.” I’m guessing . . . oh, turkey? After which the elves from Ontario, Australia, Great Britain, the Maritimes—the young folk who have followed some private dream to the mountains of Canada—will clean up after us.

There certainly is that to be said for Christmas away!

Have a great day, wherever you are.

The Christ in our Christmas

Merry Christmas, friends, and I mean it. Celebrate! Be merry!

Why? Because we’ve passed the winter solstice successfully and the sun is coming back home—as it were—to the Northern Hemisphere, and that’s a pretty good indication that we may experience another spring soon!

The air is, of course, full of the admonitions to “keep Christ in Christmas,” or “put Christ back into Christmas,” and so on, but as loudly as anyone can shout that from the rooftops, our cultural world will continue to celebrate “Christmas” as a family holiday, a feasting time, a time for gift-giving, readings from Isaiah and Luke and the playing of “Christmas” CDs and old movie classics like Dickens “A Christmas Carol.” Plus—of course—the ubiquitous trees with lights, the wreaths and the mad, stress-driven last minute shopping.

Adding to all this a sideways nod to the babe in the manger may well be a case of too little, too late, too guilt-driven—like phoning grandma on December 26th and wishing her a happy Christmas there in the nursing home in Timbuktu.

Here’s a thought. The Christmas holiday is a cultural habit. It’s a much-needed celebration in the midst of the coldest, bleakest phase of the earth’s cycles, when we fragile humans have to put out our best just to survive and can barely remember green grass and flowers. Let it be a celebration of the fact that the days are lengthening now and hope is abroad again.

I don’t quite get the “Put Christ back into Christmas” admonition, as if it were possible to take him out, put him in, or control his whereabouts in any way whatsoever. Far better to “put him” where he’d rather be: a wise and guiding partner in the way we live our lives every day of the year. Were that to be our stance, Christmas, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, Thanksgiving, as well as every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, would have Christ and his gospel implicit at its core, minus the phoney and futile admonitions to (at least) feel guilty if we celebrate in any way excepting on our knees.

So enjoy your families, relish the anticipation of gifts unopened under the tree, give thanks to your creator for the good things (turkey and sage dressing, for instance) that his earth has provided for you, do something to make the turn of the season a hopeful moment for someone else.

Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.

And when you read, “Put Christ back into Christmas,” think, “Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, you have done it unto me.” It’s impossible to take Christ out of any part of a life lived by this tenet.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone

Merry Christmas everyone!

I decided today that I don’t care for Christmas much. In part, the conclusion came while trying to find appropriate gifts for my wife and daughter. Over the years, I’ve learned that out there in the retail world, there just isn’t anything that does my love for them justice. And even if there were, I probably wouldn’t recognize it.

Adding to the gift shopping blues, of course, is the problem of justifying the frantic activity that precedes the holiday. Simultaneous this year with a Messiah performance, numerous banquets, concerts and parties, etc. we were hosting a virus in our household, a stubborn one that seemed determined to undermine the enjoyment of each event. There just wasn’t time to rest and get well, it seemed.

Why should it be like this? Today I was browsing in the November 27^th, 2007 Christian Century. In it, Valerie Weaver-Zercher—in an article entitled Wedding, Inc.—refers to journalist Rebecca Mead[1] as follows: “Although none of the writers [about the commercialization of weddings] is equipped to counsel pastors, all of them detail the way in which commercial interests have stepped into what Mead calls the ‘vacuum of authority’ regarding how people should marry(30).” I think it would be appropriate to surmise that we don’t know how to celebrate Christmas anymore, just like we don’t know how to marry, and that commercial interests have stepped into the “vacuum of authority” and are telling us how it ought to be done. Frankly, I don’t like their agenda for the holidays.

One of the items adding to the busyness of the season was a sermon I promised to deliver on the Sunday before New Year. I’m half done at this point, and will have to work on it while we’re at our daughter’s place in Edmonton over Christmas. What to say that could help people? I’m going to compare our New Year to that of other cultures—briefly—particularly the Jewish Rosh Hashanah, which, according to my sources, is a time of introspection, renewal and celebration, based on the religious notion that God is assessing our individual conduct over the past year and is urging us to evaluate and renew our commitment to him.

Now, suppose we were to scrap—or at least downplay—the Christmas celebration because of it’s ambiguity and its co-option by Santa Clause and his cohorts and replace it with a new New Year. Falling on March 22, it would herald the approach of spring, and would be similar to Rosh Hashanah in that it would be a solemn occasion for introspection, renewal of commitment, and finally, a gigantic day of feasting and celebration, dancing and singing to honour the LORD’s care over the earth and its people and the promise of a good year of sowing and harvest, learning and growing.

How long would it take for the commercial interests to co-opt that? Well, the telling factor would be whether or not we allowed the development of a “vacuum of authority” to invite the secular world to tell us how to celebrate it in a way that would heighten once again the urge to consume with great profligacy.

We’ll get through Christmas again. I sense that there are people around me who don’t feel the disappointment with the season that I do. Perhaps they have filled the vacuum themselves with something meaningful. I hope so.

Meanwhile, we did decide this year to reduce our spending on gifts for one another to a minimum, and instead, we’ve donated what we would tend to spend ordinarily to an MCC Global Family education project in Uganda. I suspect that in the future, we may enlarge on this way of celebrating Christmas, and hopefully fill the vacuum for ourselves that way.

Merry Christmas, everybody. And a Rosh Hashanah New Year

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[1] See Mead, Rebecca, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. Penguin Books