Blue Christmas: The Cure for Christmas Melancholy

The cure for Christmas melancholia is not, as a popular song tells us, that we “need a little Christmas right now.” Nor is it necessarily Puritan austerity or renunciation of all observance of Christmas. The cure, strange as it may seem, is good theology. 

Hi, this is John Koessler, jumping in before we start to let you know about a new book that would make a great gift for that person who loves both Christmas and reading. It’s called Christmas Travelers, and it’s a collection of reflections, essays, and poems about the birth of the Savior. It includes a number of beautiful color illustrations that make the hardcover or paperback a great gift for someone who cherishes the Advent and Christmas season, as well as for seekers who

Dr. John Koessler is an award-winning writer and retired faculty emeritus of Moody Bible Institute. John writes the Practical Theology column for Today in the Word and a monthly column on prayer for Mature Living. He is the author of 16 books. His latest book , When God is Silent, is published by Lexham Press. You can learn more about John at https://www.johnkoessler.com.

Transcript

I imagine everyone has something that epitomizes their Christmas experience. It’s often a song or a movie. For me, it’s that moment in A Charlie Brown Christmas when Linus and Charlie Brown are discussing the meaning of Christmas.

“Christmas is coming, but I’m not happy,” Charlie Brown complains. “I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel. I just don’t understand Christmas, I guess.” A little later, after Charlie Brown selects a scrawny little Christmas tree that drops its needles for the pageant, he laments, “Everything I do turns into a disaster. I guess I don’t really know what Christmas is all about.”

I first saw A Charlie Brown Christmas on television in 1965, when it aired on CBS. I was twelve years old at the time, and it captivated me. I loved everything about it: the music, the animation, the storyline. But most of all, I loved its honesty, because even at that young age, I had already noticed a connection between Christmas and melancholia.

A famous song, performed by just about every musical artist who has ever released a holiday album, describes Christmas as “the most wonderful time of the year” and the “hap-happiest season of all.” But many people have a different experience. Theirs is more like Charlie Brown’s. Like him, they wonder why they don’t feel the way they are supposed to feel. Their Christmas experience is tinged with longing and sadness, and they blame themselves. Or the universe. Or maybe God.

I notice it in myself, and I’ve concluded that Charlie Brown is asking the wrong question. Instead of wondering why we don’t feel the way we are supposed to feel, we ought to ask what it is about Christmas that causes us to expect to feel something remarkable to begin with. The answer to this question is more complex than you might expect. It’s not just one thing—this feeling of seasonal melancholia springs from multiple sources.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

One reason our feelings tend to fall short is that we expect Christmas to match our memory. This expectation is infused with nostalgia. I don’t think that it is an accident that the first spirit that visits Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol comes to remind him of his past:

“Who and what are you?” Scrooge demanded. “I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.” “Long Past?” inquired Scrooge observant of its dwarfish stature. “No. Your past.”[1]

This is Dickens at his best, functioning as the master psychologist. He understands that what we are is the sum of what we have been. This does not mean that we cannot change. The possibility of change is the promise that lies at the heart of his story. But the fact that the first Spirit to appear to Scrooge is the ghost of his past is a signal that change is unlikely to occur before we have understood the forces that have shaped us.

Take a careful look at your Christmas tree, and you will find that it probably says as much about your past as it does Christmas. If your tree is like mine, it is as layered as an archeological dig. Most of us aren’t just celebrating the arrival of a new holiday; we are celebrating the past. What is more, it isn’t some biblical past that moves us but our own. As Christmas draws near, the collective weight of every Christmas we have ever known bears down upon us like a demanding parent with impossible expectations. We aren’t merely trying to celebrate something; our aim is to recreate.

This is a vain hope for two reasons. First, because the conditions that made Christmas Past have dissipated. Time has moved on. The children have grown. People have moved. Some have died. Even the same ingredients, after we have measured them with meticulous accuracy, take on a slightly different flavor. Try as you might, you will only be able to reproduce an echo of what you think you remember.

All these things point to the second reason for our failure. The Christmas you recall is probably not the one you experienced. What you are feeling is nostalgia, not memory. The term comes from a compound word formed by joining the Greek noun meaning "return” with the noun meaning "pain". In other words, to the ancient mind, nostalgia is the pain of longing to return. It is an acute case of homesickness.

Unfortunately, the vision of the past that nostalgia provides is one that has been enhanced by distance. It is a picture of our experience with the sharp edges worn down by time and forgetfulness. I am not exactly saying that it is a lie. But it is not exactly the truth either. It is a softer version. As if this version of our reality had been reproduced by that artist who called himself the “painter of light.” I don’t mean Rembrandt or Turner.

Days of Future Past

What we experience as a longing for our past actually has to do with the future. It is what C. S. Lewis has called, in The Weight of Glory, a “desire for our own far off country” and “a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience.”[2] As James K. A. Smith similarly puts it, “We are always on the way; the Christian life is a ‘refugee spirituality,’ because we are longing for a home we’ve never been to.”[3]

As Lewis and Smith describe nostalgia, the feeling is not quite a distortion. It is more of an anticipation of the life to come. We experience the ache of nostalgia as a kind of pleasant grief, the sorrow for a bygone age that will never return. But what if it is the opposite? Is it possible that this longing springs from a desire for what is yet to come? If this is the case, then our orientation is all wrong. Instead of looking backward and trying to recreate the past, the purpose of this ache is to help us face forward. It was the disposition of the patriarchs, who the writer of Hebrews says were “still living by faith when they died.” According to Hebrews 11:13: “They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth.”

During the holiday season, we feel obliged to be happy. I am not talking about the kind of happiness one sometimes feels in the ordinary course of events. What I am describing is more extreme. It is a sense that it is our Christian duty to have a transcendent experience at Christmas. When I became a serious follower of Jesus shortly after I turned 19, I can recall wondering how that would change my experience of Christmas. The honest answer was that it diminished it to some degree. Learning the truth about the Nativity of Christ stripped Christmas of its gaudier aspects. The things I loved most about the holiday season had nothing at all to do with the event it is supposed to celebrate.

The Myth of Christmas Magic

Christmas cards, carols, and just about every holiday movie we have ever seen have told us that the Christmas season is supposed to be magical and transforming. Scripture does, in fact, portray the Nativity and the incarnation of Christ as something miraculous and transformative. The birth of Christ was a singular event with cosmic significance, not only for “all the people,” but for creation itself. Yet describing it as magical is something quite different.

But the effects of Christ’s Nativity are not linked to a particular season, if by “season” we mean a specific month of the year. The idea of sacred time does not originate with the church. It was an essential part of the religious landscape of the Old Testament from which the gospel sprang. Yet the arrival of Christ so altered that landscape that the apostle Paul would later call those things: “a shadow of the things that were to come” and tell the Colossians their reality is found in Christ (Col. 2:17). The Nativity was a sacred event. Christmas, as we know and celebrate it–not so much.

Christmas as a season does not have the power to suspend the regular order (or disorder) of the fallen world. It does not possess magical powers to make all things whole. We see the evidence of this in the Scriptural accounts of Christ’s birth. Miraculous events do take place. There are signs and wonders. But, simultaneously with these remarkable events, we see that all the ordinary functions of the world, along with its failings, are also in full view in the Nativity story. Taxes must be paid. Governments rule inequitably. Joseph works away at his carpentry. The inn is so full that there is no room. The religious leaders who ought to know what has happened are puzzled. The world is indeed invested, but not with magic. It is visited by God, who has come in the form of a child. Creation itself will eventually be remade as a result, but that has not yet happened. Then, as now, “everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation” (2 Pet. 3:4).

The Great Reversal

It may sound as if my message is the gospel of “lower your expectations.” But what I have to say is really the opposite. The great hope of Christmas is that at the incarnation, God entered the broken world in human form. As a result of this act, a series of events was put into motion that have fundamentally changed us and which will remake the world. The miracle of this event was not only that God became flesh but that he also subjected himself to the brokenness of the world he entered. Jesus “humbled himself by becoming obedient to death” (Phil. 2:8). This is what C. S. Lewis calls “the deeper magic” in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

It is a kind of unraveling and drawing in. The curse of sin is reversed and for the believer, its consequences are drawn into the sphere of grace. To quote from The Great Divorce, another work by C. S. Lewis, it is what he calls the “retrospective” power of redemption. Lewis writes: “The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven; the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,” and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.”[4]

Of course, when Lewis speaks of “the good man,” he is not talking about goodness as an achievement. This is a goodness that comes to us as a gift. The theological words for this are grace and redemption. They are words that describe the great reversal that the preacher Phillips Brooks writes about in the carol O Little Town of Bethlehem: 

O holy Child of Bethlehem,
descend to us, we pray;
cast out our sin, and enter in,
be born in us today.

I think we sometimes misunderstand the preacher’s intent with these words. It is not Christ who is born in us. It is we who are born in Christ. To use the language of Jesus himself, we are “born again” (John 3:3, 7; See 1 Pet. 1:27). The Nativity of Christ was a singular and unrepeatable event. It may be reenacted in the Christmas pageant each season, but it can never be repeated. The new life that comes to us as a result of that act of God is something else. It is our repeated experience, but it has no season. The life we celebrate at Christmas is something that we draw upon every day and which is reproduced in others through the preaching of the gospel.

The cure for Christmas melancholia is not, as another song tells us, that we “need a little Christmas right now.” Nor is it necessarily Puritan austerity or renunciation of all observance of Christmas. The cure, strange as it may seem, is good theology. We should not expect from Christmas what Christ alone can supply. It is not a sin to look back, but we can become trapped there.

We need not fear Christmas melancholy. I think we ought to view it as a kind of signpost that points away from that which is not God and toward a life yet to come. It says, “This, not that,” and “Then, not now.” It ought to prompt us to say, “Even so, Come, Lord Jesus.”