Christmas Romance

Suggested Reading: Song of Solomon 2

Jeremy proposed to me on Christmas Eve Eve, and we might never have started dating if it weren’t for that song “The Christmas Shoes,” so I know a thing or two about Christmas romance.

You know about Christmas romance, too. As soon as Halloween ends, many cable channels, and even Netflix, are filled with offerings like “Marry Me at Christmas,” “The Sweetest Christmas,” “The Mistletoe Inn,” “With Love, Christmas,” “Four Christmases and a Wedding,” “A Christmas Prince,” and, I’m sure the very different, “My Christmas Prince.”

I am not ashamed to admit that I have, at times, watched a Christmas romance or ten. It doesn’t matter that I know that the coffee-guzzling corporate lawyer and the tea-sipping small-town bookstore owner will fall in love under a shooting Christmas star within the first five minutes of the film. The predictability is part of the charm. Sometimes it’s just nice to pretend to live in a world where everyone has an endless wardrobe of cozy sweaters, everything smells like cocoa, and all problems are tidily resolved within two hours, with or without the help of a twinkling-eyed deity-less angel.

Because in a Christmas romance, Santa Claus and angels are optional, but Jesus is non-existent. Hopes and prayers are answered in the form of human love. This isn’t just a phenomenon of cable television. Matthew Arnold, in the 1800s, started the last stanza of his famous poem “Dover Beach” with the lines “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another! for the world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new, / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” In the world’s darkness, sometimes it feels like our hope can only be found in the arms of another person.

I know what you’re thinking…Poetry, blah, blah, blah. Did you say you and your husband were brought together by “The Christmas Shoes”?

Yes, indeed. That song about the child whose one Christmas wish is to get his dying mother a pair of fancy shoes kind of led to my very first date with Jeremy.

It was January 2006. Jeremy and I knew each other from our church’s young adult small group. I was surviving my first year teaching, and Jeremy was working for Delta at the airport. Jeremy wound up going above and beyond helping a customer trying to make a quick round trip to attend a friend’s funeral, even giving the man one of his employee-perk tickets.

“Do you know who I am?” the man asked Jeremy.

Jeremy did not.

It turns out that he was a member of the band NewSong, whose most famous song is “The Christmas Shoes.” The band was in town for Winter Jam, a Christian music concert. Out of gratitude for Jeremy’s help, he gave him two backstage passes to the concert.

Jeremy, who later told me had been waiting for a fortuitous opportunity to ask me on a date, assumed that as a good Christian girl, I would love to attend and called me.

I, on the receiving end, had one of those moments in which you process a million thoughts in one second. I actually liked Jeremy and hoped that he liked me, but…

Here’s the thing. I was, and am, a really awkward person. I often doubt my ability to wear the right thing, do the right thing, say the right thing. I know my interests are weird, such as always having a quote from Victorian poetry handy, and while I enjoy my quirks, I don’t always trust other people to understand me. I can be like a turtle, hurtling into my shell at the nearest hint of danger.

Of course, people often turn to romance as a way to validate their worth. When you think that your passion for mythology or British medieval history has crossed a threshold into certain eccentricity, knowing that another person has chosen you to love is a powerful answer to the question, “Is there something wrong with me?”

But, in case you’ve never tried, let me assure you that it’s hard to form a relationship with someone when you’re a turtle. Now, at the ripe old age of 35, I look back on my 23-year-old-self and want to say, “You’re so young! Stop worrying!” Because as I left awkward adolescence and entered awkward young adulthood, I was worried. I had finished high school and college without the hint of a grand love story. I worried that although I had always planned on being a wife and mother, maybe God had other plans. Maybe I was just too reserved for someone else to truly know me in that intimate way that romantic love requires.

…in that infinite second while Jeremy waited for my response, my brain scrambled for excuses, reasons to retreat back into my shell, all of them valid. It’s a school night. I have grading to do. I don’t like contemporary Christian music. But either in an act of bravery or cowardice, it seemed better or simpler to just say yes.

Jeremy and I went backstage to Winter Jam. He didn’t listen to contemporary Christian music either, so we didn’t know anybody or any songs. We couldn’t find his (mom’s) car in the parking lot afterwards. It was, indeed, awkward. But that was fine.

Eleven months later, on December 23rd, Jeremy asked me to marry him on my parents’ front step, the place where he had picked me up for our first date. As far as I know, there was no shooting star, but my parents did have Christmas lights on the shrubbery. I had never been so happy in my entire life. A true Christmas romance.

Is this a trivialization of Christmas? Reducing the mystery and the magnitude of the moment to the temporary beauty of lights and glitter and gently falling snow? To making wishes and hoping that they come true?

Well, of course, but it starts in truth, the Truth. What do humans long for more than to be seen and understood and cherished? Romantic love is one way that we attempt this complete understanding, but because it involves human beings, it is never entirely successful. We fail each other and ourselves over and over again. We hurt or hide out of an instinct of self-preservation. Love demands that we give ourselves unconditionally and without reservation, and we cannot do it.

But Christmas is the time when the perfect Love we crave became incarnate. In spite of, because of, our failings and fear, Love came to us, to draw us out of our shells. This is the Love we yearn to know: the Love that never fails to understand, the Love that gives and gives even when we do not. And, thankfully, this Love never falters in its mercy because sometimes our longing for it becomes misplaced. The timeless story of humanity is that we too often forget, or don’t even know, what we’re looking for and seek to fill the void with shadows instead of substance.

I would never call the love that Jeremy and I have for each other as insubstantial, though. Romantic love can be part of God’s plan, too. A lesson that I am constantly in the process of either forgetting or re-learning is that when God says “no” or “not yet,” it’s because He has something better in mind. When I think back to the person I was fifteen years ago, I don’t know if my turtle nature could have fully recovered from a temporary love. And I also needed to learn that my value does not lie in another person’s estimation. It turns out, I didn’t need a boyfriend, I needed a partner: someone who would enact the great symbol of marriage with me, learning (and re-learning) what it means to sacrifice, what it means to to be selfless, and what it means to trust. Our love is strong because, unlike television marketers and Matthew Arnold, we do not believe that human love is the solution to human suffering. Our love is strong because it points us to that greater Love.

And I think that is what I am trying to say in this meandering story about Hallmark movies, turtles, and “The Christmas Shoes.” That the experiences of our lives — the pain, the joy, the ceaseless waiting and longing for one thing or another — are there to clear away the shadows: We are in a constant state of Advent, watching the darkness be broken by a Dawn more achingly beautiful than we ever could have imagined.