I’ll bet my Christmas drama was more bizarre than yours
The Christmas story has always been blighted by the realities of the human situation — why should we expect anything different?
I hope you all had a terrific Christmas and New Year.
A couple of days ago I read the OG Christmas story in The Message version of the Bible — the version of the story told by Matthew.
It’s not a particularly nice story.
It certainly isn’t a story about giving nice gifts or having rich table time with family. It’s not even about the birth of Jesus, in terms of how much narrative time that event actually receives. It’s far more about the political and human drama that unfolds around that event.
In tone, the story has more in common with the first Omen horror movie (the story of Damien Thorn the Antichrist!) than it does your typical Hollywood Christmas or holiday movie. Just like The Omen, a major motif of the story is the fulfilment of ancient prophecy and the events that unfold in response to it, in this case sparked by the arrival of scholars from the east who, from reading the stars, have worked out the time and place of that prophetic fulfilment — the return of a long-absent God to his people in the form of a human child.
Their arrival triggers something terrible and equally ancient in the court of Jerusalem. Historically, kings in Jerusalem haven’t had a good time of it. Just several hundred years earlier, the city was sacked and the temple destroyed and the inhabitants of Judea carted off to Babylon as exiles — despite a generally accepted theology that said God would never let such a thing happen. But it did happen, and the people — particularly the present king, Herod — haven’t forgotten. The last thing Herod needs is a bunch of trumped up academics swanning about town touting celestial portents and the birth of a divinely ordained usurper. So Herod does what any self-respecting dictator would do in biblical times — he orders the massacre of hundreds of children.
However, the main players in the drama have been warned in a series of dreams to get out of town. Their own mini-exile follows, and they escape the madness. But what they leave behind is a hot mess. The scope of Matthew’s version of the Christmas story is epic, traversing generations and borders and political alliances and royal dynasties, a horrific saga of misunderstanding and overreaction to rival anything written by George RR Martin. It’s a legit game of thrones story, in which a young family flees a violent sandstorm of death and destruction and remains in hiding until the turmoil has settled.
The Christmas carols, the Christmas cards, the Hollywood holiday movies, get the tone completely wrong. It’s no feel-good story intended to inspire warm feelings — it’s a drama about the human shit show and what happens when the Wholly Other triggers humanity’s worst fears merely by entering the narrative, and even then in the most mundane way — in Bono’s words, as a child born in shit and straw.
So, speaking of drama and shit shows, my Christmas was pretty bizarre.
A little background: Almost nine years ago, my dad left my mum, and yes, another woman was involved. There’s never a good time for such a thing to happen, but this was particularly bad timing, from my point of view — it happened at the end of a week from hell in which my wife had a double mastectomy necessitated by breast cancer and during which every day was spent confronting the implications of the operation and the associated prognosis. Dad, somehow oblivious to all this, chose that moment to upend his and mum’s life. And the ripples from his decision continued for years.
I’d seen dad just twice in those nine years. He lives in Western Australia and we live in Auckland, New Zealand. He came to stay for a (difficult) week back in 2014, and I saw him again that year at my sister’s wedding in Melbourne, which he attended not with ‘the other woman’, but with an altogether new woman he ended up with when the OG ‘other woman’ didn’t work out.
I haven’t seen Mum much in that time either — just two or three occasions, what with the distance (she’s in Australia too), and then the pandemic. I’ve seen my sister even less.
But this Christmas, we hosted all of them (including the other woman).
If ever there was an instance of the Christmas story unfolding against a backdrop of intrigue and drama, this was it. There was no actual slaughter of innocents at the family table on Christmas Day, but the potential for blood on the floor was never far from anyone’s mind.
But it turned out differently to what anyone could have reasonably expected. And not because traditional family conventions took over — we’re not a family that stays silent when there are grievances to be aired. But in the moment, the history didn’t seem to matter — to anyone, even those with genuine reasons to hold a grudge. Something else took over — something greater than the sum of the parts.
I guess that something was grace. Which, of course, does its best work in the context of the human shit show. Acceptance in place of bitterness; love in place of accusation; belonging in place of insecurity.
The Christmas story was always a convergence of our bleakest realities and our brightest possibilities. The magic of the story, and the reason for its longevity, is that in the face of human frailty, compromise, and sometimes even atrocity, grace wins out.
Ah Christmas-the continuation of histories and tension. Thanks for allowing the bizarre to be somewhat ‘normalised’ and to articulate why the ‘niceties’ of Christmas have always felt faux.