Go Where Your Faith Takes You
On Christmas vs. the Culture of Christmas, and Finding the True Meaning in “Non-traditional” Places
“The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.” -Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel
“I’d rather be in the mountains thinking about God, than in a church thinking about the mountains.” -John Muir
It’s that time of year again.
I still watch A Charlie Brown Christmas, because in addition to it taking me back to memories of my childhood Christmases, it contains a lesson about the true meaning of Christmas.
People miss the point of the Peanuts classic, even though Linus lays it all out right in the middle. We celebrate the birth; not a tree, a big man in a red suit, or some presents.
At one point, Charlie Brown gets confused and upset. Why? Because his friends don’t like the tree he selected. No wonder he’s confused.
No wonder a lot of people are confused.
“”I guess you were right, Linus. I shouldn’t have picked this little tree,” says Charlie Brown. “Everything I do turns into a disaster. I guess I don’t really know what Christmas is all about. Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?”
But then Linus comes to the rescue.
“Sure, Charlie Brown, I can tell you what Christmas is all about,” says Linus.
“Lights, please.”
“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.”
“And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.”
“And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.”
“And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” — Luke 2: 8–14
As we all know by now, the story in A Charlie Brown Christmas seems to be about a tree, when in fact, it’s about the true meaning of Christmas, or more accurately how people focus on the traditional accoutrements of Christmas — the presents, the lights, the decorations … the tree — rather than its true meaning.
Do you have any doubt about this? Then just look out your front door. Drive through your neighborhood. Or walk into a Wal-Mart. Or better yet, look at your own living room.
We did not spend our first Christmas as a married couple next to a tree festooned with presents. I don’t even recall whether we had a tree up in our apartment that year. It was 1994. Our first Christmas together was spent in what most people would call a “non-traditional” setting.
We actually spent it — one week after we got married — on our honeymoon in New York City. We did not come from affluent families. We had no real money of our own. No one gifted us some trip to Hawaii or the Caribbean. So we did what a brand new attorney five months into his first job and a third year law student could afford: We flew to New York and paid for what we could pay for with our own money.
And I would not trade our honeymoon for anything I have heard about since.
We spent Christmas Eve watching The Phantom of the Opera at the Majestic Theater, Davis Gaines in the title role, the man who had the unenviable task of following Michael Crawford as the second person to play the Phantom, and we were completely blown away.
On Christmas morning, December 25, 1994, we got up and walked a few blocks from our hotel, The Gorham (now named the Blakely) to the historic Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church; not because we were Presbyterian, but because we were told it would be a nice church at which to attend Christmas morning services. And the concierge was right.
We were warmly greeted as guests and took our seats as the organ music began sounding a familiar hymn. We listened in rapt attention as the pastor delivered a brief, but powerful story perfectly apt for the day.
“A priest was trying to finish his Christmas sermon the night before Christmas Eve. His week had been full of interruptions and commitments which had fragmented his time and left him just a bit frazzled. He no sooner got settled after one such interruption when a nun from the orphanage came and asked if he could get a child out from under one of the beds. Apparently, the boy had crawled under one of them after supper and refused to come out.
When the priest got to the bedside, he sat down and began to talk conversationally to the child about the evening; about Christmas coming up; about the songs they would sing at church the next night. After several minutes of this, there was no response from the child. So the priest peaked under the bed to see if he could see anything. Sure enough, he could see the boy laying there under his bed.
So the priest laid down on the floor next to the bed and continued his monologue. But after several minutes, there was still no response from the young boy.
The priest was now getting frustrated. He had a sermon to write, and it wasn’t going to happen with him talking to a boy hiding under the bed. So the priest decided to crawl under the bed and lay right next to the boy.
So he did, and he continued to talk about everyday sorts of things. About a half an hour passed this way. And then, the priest suddenly noticed that the boy had slipped his small hand into the priest’s larger one. For a while, they continued to lay there holding hands, not saying much of anything.
Finally, the priest said that it was a bit crowded under the bed, and couldn’t they go someplace where there was a little more room. In this way, he coaxed the little boy out from under the bed.
As he reflected on this encounter, the priest realized that he had just finished his sermon while lying under the bed with the little boy. He realized that children and adults live their lives stuck “under the bed” — confined by the limitations which result from our circumstances, our choices, our human nature, and our own free will. Try as we might, we cannot get out from under our “bed.” And so God meets us there. God took on human flesh and lived with us so that we could be released from our confines.”
When the service was over, we were filled, in more ways than one. We had focused on the true meaning of Christmas on our honeymoon. It was the perfect way to begin our life together. We felt the presence of God, in and outside that church building. Something about the pastor, the message, the choir, the building, the people, and the moment, made us feel God’s presence.
On Christmas night, we saw Les Miserables, still in the middle of its original 16-year run of 6,680 performances on Broadway, at the Imperial Theater. Even though the running time was nearly three hours, we were so energized afterward we had trouble winding down, and in the city that never sleeps, it was even more difficult.
The next morning we got up early and walked a few blocks to the original Tiffany’s and recreated two scenes from the movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. At the time we met, and to this day, it is my wife’s favorite movie, and after watching it with her so many times, it has become one of mine.
Among many other things, it’s about two young people struggling to make their way in the world and doing it in different ways, who meet and fall in love. And although they keep letting other people and events get in the way, there’s a climactic scene at the end in which Paul Varjak tells Holly Golightly, “Okay, life’s a fact, people do fall in love, people do belong to each other, because that’s the only chance anybody’s got for real happiness.”
The first scene we recreated was Holly getting out of a cab and having breakfast while looking at the window displays. We then went inside and recreated the scene in which Paul and Holly visit Tiffany’s to make a purchase, and since he can’t afford anything else, Paul ends up having a ring from a box of Cracker Jack engraved as a present for Holly. (Which is essentially what I was able to afford when my wife and I got married). On our own visit, the one thing I was able to afford was some Tiffany embossed stationary. I don’t even remember what we did with it.
That first Christmas we spent together as a married couple, we were not at home; we were traveling. It would turn out to be a foreshadowing.
When we were done, we returned to the town we lived in back then. I went back to work and my wife went back to clerking for a law firm while she waited for the second semester of her last year in law school to begin.
For a while thereafter, we fell into the habit of celebrating Christmas the usual, American way, by putting up a tree and decorating it, shopping among the crowds, and exchanging presents. Sometimes we went to church, sometimes we didn’t.
We had two little boys, and we learned Santa’s trade, staying up late into the night to put a bike together, or build out another Lego castle. For many Christmases, we built a lot of things in the wee hours. And it was magical. And then to see their faces light up in the early morning was priceless, and those memories remain so to this day.
This was the way we spent Christmas many times during their childhood. We built memories and life experiences with them we cherish. And it eventually got to the point where we began to look back on those years with a powerful sense of wistfulness.
But as the boys got older and grew, Christmas morning began to slowly, but surely, lose its luster. We no longer had to play Santa and we no longer stayed up into the night.
And eventually, looking back on those sweet, precious, early family Christmases, I wrote a poem about it to my wife:
Of Christmases past;
At my parents’ house
Awaiting the birth of our second child.
Of driving across the vast, southwestern deserts
We’ve crossed so many times
In Arizona and New Mexico and into west Texas
Into lands we never knew existed -
Of mountains and monasteries near the Big Bend,
Down along old highway 90 to Del Rio,
To meet your mother.
Or up I-15 in California to Big Bear -
Skiing in perfect weather,
Then dropping down out of the mountains
Into southern California 75-degree afternoons,
In late December.
Of snowstorms on the east coast,
And trekking into the West Virginia hills.
Of driving up to Utah on Christmas Day
When everything was closed down-
Our little family packed into a used Honda Civic
That we hoped would make it all the way.
Oh Big Bear,
High in the San Bernardino Mountains
East of L.A.,
For three straight years.
Thanksgiving in a cabin where the bread
Would not rise because of the altitude!
Then skiing the next two years,
Sublime days with little boys —
Sprinting off and beating us down the hills,
Against our constant admonitions,
The six-year-old not even using ski poles!
How did he do that?
Coming back to the chalet exhausted and spent,
Falling asleep to a roaring fire.
I see it all in my dreams now -
As sweet as it was the days it happened
And branded itself into my memories
Forever.
When I finished the poem and read it, I realized something: We had not spent every Christmas playing Santa and putting presents under a tree. In fact, that had been the exception to the proverbial rule. I realized that many of our best Christmases had been spent like our very first one as a married couple: Traveling, away from a house with a garish tree and presents under it, and Santa nowhere in sight.
We felt God’s presence acutely on those trips, crossing the deserts of the American southwest in late December, down along the Texas border to Del Rio, along Interstate 15 in Utah up to Salt Lake City, on those slopes with our boys in the California and West Virginia mountains, and every other place we have been with them.
Although the poem reflected the reality that we had routinely celebrated Christmas in many different ways — by traveling, taking trips, and even taking the boys skiing in the mountains — as they got older, Christmas eventually became the more “traditional” version, with trees, presents, big meals, and so on.
We tried. We made the effort. We began to attend the candle light services. We always tried to get into the spirit. Sometimes we did; sometimes we didn’t. It seemed that when we did the traditional version, we were more distant from the true meaning of Christmas, and we felt more distant from God.
It got to be where we felt closer to God and the true meaning of the day when we were doing something like we had done in those early years with the boys, driving across a desert in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and south Texas, or into the mountains in California, North Carolina, or West Virginia.
For instance, in 2019, almost on a whim, we drove across country from Virginia to Oregon, by way of West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California, before heading back through Utah, Colorado, Kansas and the rest of the states we had come through. And in those vast deserts, those snow-capped mountain ranges, and in those distant, ancient forests of redwoods along the Pacific coast in northern California and southern Oregon, we felt closer to God than we did when we were opening garishly wrapped presents next to a sparkling tree. And although we initially wondered why that was, we intuitively already knew.
We spent that Christmas eve in the town of Eureka, California, on the Pacific coast, about 275 miles north of San Francisco, and 100 miles south of the Oregon border.
We’ve always known the true meaning of Christmas and done our best to observe it. But sometimes that effort gets swallowed up in what I call the culture of Christmas, especially the way it is done in America. The culture of Christmas actually begins way back before Thanksgiving and builds day after day, week after week, until Christmas day and then all of a sudden, Christmas is over.
But the culture of Christmas continues. Everything goes on sale. People return gifts they don’t like and still keep buying, up through New Year’s Day.
Indeed, the culture of Christmas has completely overrun Christmas itself. And when that happens, it can become difficult to remember what it’s all about. And so you find different ways to get outside the culture of Christmas to get back to what’s important.
Some people don’t feel the presence of God by putting up a shiny tree and throwing a bunch of presents underneath. In fact, those things are completely irrelevant to the true meaning of Christmas. They look beyond the “traditions.” And they do something different; they go elsewhere. They celebrate in a different way.
They go where their faith takes them.
John Muir once observed, “I’d rather be in the mountains thinking about God, than in a church thinking about the mountains.”
Indeed.
Others can have their Black Friday, their tree, their lights and decorations, Santa and their presents, and their exchanges and returns.
But I will take being in the mountains or someplace like it with my family and thinking about God. And the true meaning of Christmas.
Glen Hines is the author of five books, including the recently published Of Time and Rivers, and the highly-regarded Bring in the Gladiators, Observations From a Former College Football Player Who Was Never Able to Become a Fan, all available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. He is the writer and producer of the book and podcast Welcome to the Machine, available on most podcast platforms. His writing on military service, sports, current events, the outdoors, and the bright and dark sides of American culture has been published in various outlets, such as Sports Illustrated, Task and Purpose, the Human Development Project, Amazon, and Audible.
