The Color of Christmas

I’ve been thinking this week about C.S. Lewis’ rather negative view of our Christmas craziness. He was writing this back in the 1950’s or so. I assume that the craziness has only grown crazier.

He says that there seem to be two holidays. One is called Xmas, and involves a great deal of partying and gift-giving. It is practiced by the religious and irreligious, as though religion is not essential to it. And he personally preferred to have little to do with it.

The other holiday he called “The Feast of the Nativity.” This is the solemn yet joyful observance of the Incarnation, God taking on human form in the Person of the Son. It is the celebration and consideration of a mysterious, divine act, whereby the infinite Son of God submits to the finiteness of human form. 

My thought on this was that those who espouse the Big Bang theory of origins claim that there must have been some nugget or particle that was so dense, when it exploded, it expanded into our present universe. I find more interesting the density that must have existed in the human person Jesus who at the same time was eternal Son of God. And, He indeed has universal significance. 

But back to C.S. Lewis. He says that just because these two holidays happen to occur on the same day of the year doesn’t mean that they have anything to do with one another.

I’ve read that the brain has never seen color. It has never smelled a rose. It has never heard a symphony. The only stimuli are electrical/chemical signals which the brain then interprets, so that you can make sense of red, fragrance, and harmony. 

You don’t know something is red until your brain tells you, the brain that has never seen red. I would like to apply this to Lewis’ two holidays. 

Many, many people celebrating Christmas this year don’t know the true color of Christmas, which is Christ. It is a reality about which their brains have not yet been triggered. The Gospel stimuli has not  reached them. And so these many, many people know a great deal about the merchandising of Christmas. But they don’t know the true color of Christmas. It’s as though they can’t see red.

Can you? It’s not an ability-thing. It’s not a “try-harder” thing. You can only appreciate the sensations that your brain interprets for you. Yet there is something mysterious, something spiritual about this, whereby you come to know, to see, a color that you have never seen before. And once you see Christ, the color of Christmas, you can never un-see Him.