Greetings from the tail end of my annual whirlwind Christmas tour. As usual, it included the raucous, loving excess of Maloney Christmas in Chicago, the still quiet of Schuettler Christmas on a snowless plain in Wisconsin, and a small blended gathering back home in Duluth. I had designs of putting out a short Christmas story on this blog, but this time of year is always horrid for diligent writing effort, and while I’ll continue to plug along on the story, it’s far from ready.

This holiday is exhausting, and I enjoy the travel rush and have relatively few people to buy for. For whatever reason, organizing myself for the whole giving and receiving side of Christmas gets harder with time. As someone who leads a largely secular existence, I have some questions about what this holiday really offers for the non-churched aside from an excuse for rampant commercialism, over-the-top decorations, and a lot of corny nostalgia that I have less patience for every year. That leaves me with some great parties and family reunions, but I don’t think there’s any need to confine those to late December. Something, clearly, is missing.

So, to find some meaning behind what this all means for me, I’ll settle for a quote from the woman I’ve been quoting a lot lately, because somehow a Jew who never had kids can best encapsulate Christmas:

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, “natural” ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion of Pandora’s box. It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born unto us.”

–Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Merry Christmas.