Editorial

By Paul Schratz

It’s a model many have tried to promote, although they appear to be having less success each year as more people gather the courage to insist that Christmas is about the birth of the Saviour.

Experience shows “Merry Christmas” making a gradual comeback over “Happy Holidays.” Churches continue to be packed at Christmas. And each year The Bay’s magnificent downtown window Nativity scene make its reappearance, so the appearance of Christ still hasn’t been rendered completely unacceptable (although part of me wonders whether the department store considers the creche just a form of kitsch to dust off each year.)

What would Christmas be like if it ever got replaced by Festivus? What if churches were closed on Dec. 24 and 25? What if O Holy Night never got downloaded to another MP3 player because everyone wanted Santa Claus is Coming to Town?

One wonders how long would Christmas continue.

All the great holidays mark occasions of joy, significant milestones, or thanksgiving. Birthday celebrations commemorate the day one enters the world. New Year’s marks the beginning of a new year and new opportunities. What does Happy Holidays commemorate? The annual onslaught of snow shovelling and monsoon rains? That doesn’t seem like much of a reason to put up lights, mail cards, share cheer, and give gifts.

Christmas without Christ would be much like a world without hope, which is what Pope Benedict XVI reflects on in his new encyclical, released, appropriately, just weeks before Christmas.

In the encyclical, entitled Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict reflects on St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, 8:24: “Spe salvi facti sumus” (“In hope we were saved”).

“Day by day,” the Pope writes, “man experiences many greater or lesser hopes, different in kind according to the different periods of his life. Sometimes one of these hopes may appear to be totally satisfying without any need for other hopes.

“When these hopes are fulfilled, however, it becomes clear that they were not, in reality, the whole. It becomes evident that man has need of a hope that goes further.”

Christmas is part of that hope that goes further - further than the gift-giving, the parties, and the decorations.

“Man’s great, true hope which holds firm in spite of all disappointments can only be God - God Who has loved us and who continues to love us `to the end,’ until all `is accomplished,’” says the Pope.

In the darkness of winter, the lights of Christmas are a reminder of hope. The Advent wreath and candles remind us for Whom we are waiting. The love and charity that abound are glimpses of hope that comes from a Saviour born. The decorations and festivities are signs of a wondrous event about to happen.

Take that, Festivus.