by JON SCHWARZ
What if we were to actually use the life of Christ as a basis for Christmas?
I have many beautiful memories of Christmas as a child. By age 6, I learned I could get out of church on Christmas Eve just by refusing to get dressed, a crucial lesson in the power of Gandhian passive resistance. There were always gifts under our tree purportedly from our cat, which taught me how much fun it is to create elaborate myths with only the loosest basis in reality. I still have a pirate ornament I had received after performing at age 12 in “The Pirates of Penzance,” together with a future “Daily Show” correspondent and a physicist specializing in quantum information.
But it was difficult then, and is impossible now, to believe that any of it had anything to do with the supposed subject of the holiday: i.e., the birth of Jesus. In fact, Christmas in the United States is the negation of that event. It’s a berserk bacchanal celebrating an Opposite Jesus, like one from the mirror image “Star Trek” universe with a muscle shirt and a goatee.
There’s a surprisingly small amount of material in the Bible about Jesus being born. But if we were actually to use it as a basis for Christmas, there are some basic things we could do.
In Matthew 1:20, an angel tells Joseph not to be upset that Mary is with child: “Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.” This suggests that Christmas would be a good day not to hassle women about how they got pregnant.
Then, in Luke 1:26, the angel Gabriel tells Mary, “thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age.” Elisabeth was over 60, so again, Christmas should be a time to remember that this is an area of life where pretty much anything can happen, and we shouldn’t get uptight about it.
In Matthew 2:21, we learn that the three wise men “presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.” Thus, on Christmas, we should give presents, but only to newborns, with one-third of the gifts precious metals and two-thirds some kind of resin.
More seriously, a biblically based Christmas could also take as its inspiration the teachings of Jesus when he grew up. Thomas Jefferson believed that the Bible contained “a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications” — but that this was mixed with “aphorisms and precepts of the purest morality and benevolence, sanctioned by a life of humility, innocence and simplicity of manners, neglect of riches, [and] absence of worldly ambition and honors.” So Jefferson took a razor to a copy of the Bible and sliced out everything he considered to be nonsense, and then stitched back together what remained.
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