Merry Christmas

National Review Online

Wednesday, December 25, 2024

 

Christmas can be complicated for Americans. In our long history, there has been many a Christmastide that our people have spent in utter crisis. Indeed, a soldier under Washington who crossed the icy Delaware on Christmas Day, or the battered armies that stilled stared at each other across the Rappahannock after the slaughter at Marye’s Heights in 1862, or the Marines who spent Christmas on Guadalcanal in 1942, or the 101st Airborne — surrounded at Bastogne at Christmas 1944 — or the men who spent Christmas in Fallujah at the close of Operation Phantom Fury in 2004, would have remembered those Christmases as a kind of living hell were it not for their comradeship and devotion to each other.

 

Even today, in a time of relative peace and prosperity, Christmas has been so commercialized and corrupted that it’s easy enough to mistake the allure of the tinsel and lights, the draw of the Amazon package and the Spider-Man action figure, for the true meaning of Christmas Day.

 

To all that, we say, “Nuts.”

 

As the angel of the Lord spoke out to the shepherds at Bethlehem, “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.

 

“Fear not” is good counsel — no matter the age or moment, and no matter one’s creed or doctrines. And Christmas is a time that Americans of all faiths, or none, may devote to sharing the deeper truths about the good things in life and the brotherhood of man: family and friends around the warmth of the dinner table, giving above getting, kindness toward strangers, help for the downtrodden. We must do it all now, while we still have the chance. As the poet Robert Burns well knew, Christmas, and the twilight days of each year, is a time for rejoicing in the possibilities of fellowship but also for a kind of sadness in the memories of the loved and lost.

 

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

 

and never brought to mind?

 

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

 

and auld lang syne?

 

No, they shouldn’t, Mr. Burns. Not this year.

 

Merry Christmas to you all, and to your families and friends.