By Amy Butler
It could very well be just me, but I usually find the post-Christmas haze to be a little bit of a let-down. After all the excitement and anticipation of Christmas Day, I am never quite sure what to do with the aftermath.
Just think: the tree at home that had for days now looked like a Currier and Ives print come to life is now looking a little bit sad. All the presents are gone from beneath it, leaving only scattered pine needles and the occasional ornament casualty. By now at least one of the strings of lights has gone out (who knows why?) and the tree has started looking decidedly brown-tinged. Thoughts turn more and more these days from what a great tree we got this year toward the overwhelming task of lugging the boxes down from the attic, putting everything away for one more year, and trying to get the tree to the curb without blanketing the entire house with dried pine needles.
As for the presents, all that remains are garbage bags full of wrapping and little territorial piles of opened gifts strategically placed for tripping all over the living room. By now some have already been forgotten; a few have fallen victim to their new owners, broken already from excessive use; some are set for return: wrong color, wrong size, wrong everything.
And the kitchen! The kitchen countertop is stacked with boxes and tins of enough sugar to keep the kids hyped up for months. There’s very little real food left in the house after the bonanza of Christmas dinner, certainly not the kind of food we’re all going to try to eat for the first few weeks of January or until we tire of our new year’s resolutions. Little by little we’ll get through the cookies and candy so generously gifted to us, but that task certainly won’t help with the challenge of transitioning back from the elastic pants.
By now all the hoped-for family interaction has unfolded, not all of it in the hoped-for fashion. In fact, all the unspoken hurts, anticipated tensions, and predictable-yet-disappointing blow-ups have come to real and explicit life. Gone are the hopes that we could just all get along for this once; instead, it’s the same as every other year (except everyone agrees that Grandma is losing it more and more with each passing day).
Down at church all of the special services, sermons, bulletins, choir productions, live nativities, are done. Finished for another year. All that remains are piles of shepherd costumes, wilting poinsettias on the altar, and stacks of extra bulletins set for the recycle bin. Sunday is still coming, but who will be there? Likely it will be a small crowd, all of whom feel some of the same sort of let-down as this Christmas gets more and more distant in the rear view mirror.
It seems we’ve used up most of our “peace to men on earth,” too. Retail workers are exhausted; they should all take a week off after the retail craze we live through before Christmas, but that would never fly around here, so everybody’s a bit grouchy. The stores have a disorganized, empty, deserted look about them, much like the Christmas tree at home. Displays are sad and picked over, and someone could seriously get hurt in the scramble to snatch up leftover ornaments for 50 percent off. Even in the parking lot things are back to being dicey as drivers are finished with all that Christmas goodwill.
Still, life goes on.
Howard Thurman’s poem, “The Work of Christmas,” sums up the challenge before us as we pick up the Christmas pieces and think about how to go forward:
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart.
We’ve lit the candles and sung the carols, imagined a blissful baby asleep, tried our best to create a perfect world for everyone we love and even some people we don’t. But inevitably Christmas comes and goes, and we are left living with our own broken humanness. Though we may feel like Christmas left us holding a bag full of empty expectations, the Christmas we try so hard to create is just the start.
Now, in the wake of crumpled wrapping paper and broken Christmas lights, the real challenge of Christmas lies before us: to take all the anticipation and effort we have laid out for this season into the year ahead: to find the lost and heal the broken, to bring God’s gift to real and tangible life all around us.
Life goes on, it’s true, but so does Christmas. Let’s get busy.