Jesus loves the whole world and Jesus loves my little family. Our family is about as American as one can be by history and habits, but our faith is global.
We learned to celebrate the coming of Jesus (glorious!) as Americans and so good traditions work for us that would not work elsewhere: A Charlie Brown Christmas, our California surfer-dude nutcracker, and our Golden Book version of the birth of Jesus. Yet the birth of Jesus was for everyone and the party has been going on for two thousand years over all the world. Our English heritage contributed Dickens and his A Christmas Carol and for Hope’s Dutch background we have always favored Sinterklass. Still the Church is bigger than any ties of blood, nation, or heritage.
No Christian celebrating Christmas is foreign to me and every Christmas jollification is to be reverenced and understood. There is a bad way to do this. Imagine a man showing up in front of our house and taking our very American inflated crèche for his house. This is stealing and his power to do so doesn’t make it better. So we should not dash around making other Christmas customs our own.
Once we had a pastor, God rest his soul, the saintly Father Michael Trigg, who taught us a better way. He studied the Romany during his doctoral studies at Oxford University and was always ready to defend them from slanders and teach us to appreciate their unique ways. He made sure we learned from the Romany and did not just take their stuff. He taught us the party at Christmas was bigger than we thought and that, if invited, we could join the joy.
The people are the party: Jesus came for people. We could not steal the tinsel, but we could ask to be invited and pitch in to the party. If lucky, such a person would invite us to exchange gifts! We might leave them a copy of It’s a Wonderful Life and they might give us nesting Christmas dolls. Father Michael taught us never to appropriate culture, but always to learn from people.
Father Michael was a man of the world, if the least worldly man I have known, and so he also spent much time in Peru. There he made friends as he always did and brought back gifts to fill his home and make his season brighter. One year he brought back the beautiful Peruvian crèche that now sits on our piano. It uses color magnificently and pictures the party in Paradise in Incan terms.
When Father Michael died, we received his papers and also the crèche. It sits on our piano reminding us of Father, one of the last Cavaliers, but also inviting us into his experience of Christmas in Peru. He made us spiritually broader and this little window into his global friendships makes us jollier.
Thank you, Father Michael. Tell the angels, saints, and the Mother of God: Merry Christmas.
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