Eighth Day of Christmas is, with Twelfth Night, some of the best of Christmas. To some extent this is because only Christians, traditional Christians at that, are left at the feast. Those who merely wanted gifts, drinks, and meals are gone. Gluttony cloys and immoderation fails
Those who think the Holiday is about “family” or time off are gone. Nobody can center their lives on a vacation or family. They are not sufficient for the size and grandeur of this holy season. They disappoint us and so like Scrooge we wish to douse the cap of Christmas and put out the light of the season long before Twelfth Day.
We cannot stand the joy in our broken state. Of course, if Christians have been partying selfishly, the party grows wearisome as well. There is no spiritual grace that allows us to taste eternity. Boredom comes from human time . . . enduring with Stoic resolve . . . and that is incompatible with a party. The moment you are just “making it” at a celebration, then you might as well quit.
Instead, Christians (should) stop and contemplate the divine, the eternal, the unmoving image of eternity in the stable at Bethlehem. The simplest children’s drawing of the Nativity can be an icon that is a window to that Holy Night.
We can live in the “Eighth Day:” the Lord’s Day. The Sabbath Rest is always the Seventh Day. God in the person of Jesus Christ rested in the tomb on that Day and then the next day Jesus defeated death.
This is the eighth day and every Christian lives in it. Sunday is, in that sense, no longer the first day only, but also the last day. We live in the perpetual Beginning and End. The calendar moved forward and so we are made new. God’s time will never move forward again.
The “secular” New Year begins on Eighth day and that is fitting. We are in the first day of the “new year.” Secular years, however, grow old. We might not live to see it, but we are 364 days from 2018. In Christ, the eighth day never ends. Christmas never ends.
Of course, we do not yet experience that full reality. We are still between, one part of us able to taste eternity, the other part stuck in time. Today, this Eighth Day, this First Day, live a moment or two in Eternity. Wish someone a Merry Christmas and have joy.
Sunday is the first eighth day and today (by chance!) is both.
Hurrah!
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