”Christmas Reawakened and Reclaimed:” Christmas In a Box

Christmas In a Box

As the snow began to quietly début winter’s arrival, I made my yearly descent to the basement.  Rummaging through the backwaters of the musty root cellar, I spied the dusty stack of aged boxes with the word “Christmas” hastily scrawled across their cardboard sides.  Inside of them lay the wonder of Christmas embodied in carefully crafted decorations and precious mementos of all sizes and sorts and types.  Staring at the boxes, I suddenly found myself entirely engulfed by the horrifying fact that we spend much of our lives boxing up wonder.

 

The Abuse of Boxes

Indeed, we put things in boxes.  The function of a box is to provide a set of distinct parameters designed to effectively contain whatever needs containing.  A box imposes restrictions.  It sets a limit as to how far something can go.  Things are assigned a defined space where they are on hold, typically because we have no use for them in the active part of our daily existence.  Therefore, they’re stored away until our existence grants them whatever tiny bit of space they are granted for however long our existence grants it.  We put things in boxes.

 

Boxes of Heart, Mind and Soul

But the majority of our boxes are not made of cardboard, or plastic, or metal, or any other such rudimentary substances.  Our boxes are not those things stored in the shadowy corners of our damp basements, or shoved into the tight confines of our suffocating attics, or crammed into the five-by ten of some self-storage on the other side of town.  These do not represent the vast majority of our boxes…at all.

The majority of our boxes won’t be found in basements, or attics, or some self-storage facility.  They are, in fact, within us.  Deep within us.  And we have made them.  We’ve tediously constructed them to protect ourselves from painful histories, or shut down truths that don’t set well with us, or eliminate the people in our lives who we find distasteful.  We build them to shield ourselves from ourselves (in whatever way that we feel we need to do that).  We build them to keep ourselves from the guilt of doing or being what we shouldn’t be doing or being.  We build boxes so that we contain those things that we would otherwise be running from, or we build them to give us a ready excuse not to run ‘to’ the things that maybe we should be running to.  We put things in boxes.

 

Why Boxes?

Some boxes might make sense.  “But why,” I asked, “do we put great things in boxes?”  Powerful things?  Things that can handily rescue us from the tangled messes that we make with such tedious perfection?  Why do we box up that which can heal our deepest wounds, wrestle our worst addictions into submission, grant us a sustainable hope that will stand against the most sustained darkness of a world gone dark?  What in the world would behoove us to box up the very things that can handily reign in all of the destructive things that we’ve cut loose that are constantly cutting us up?  What sort of insanity compels us to box up the very things that we spend the entirety of our lives searching for?

We are a stubborn bunch of people.  But that’s the message of Christmas that’s tough to swallow, and that’s the very thing that prompted the delivery of that message.  That we are stubborn to our own demise.  That we would be ‘the death of us’ unless God was willing to come and give ‘life to us.’  That the enemy is not necessarily something that’s prowling around in the shifting shadows that constantly circle us in some stealthy manner.  Rather, that we are the enemy and that it is from ourselves that we need to be saved.  That is the message embodied in the boxes tucked away in the musty confines of the root cellar with the word “Christmas” errantly scrawled across them.  That is the intent of Christmas.  That God decided to initiate the greatest rescue mission in all of human history at the greatest cost that any mission would ever demand…the death of His own Son.

 

Boxing Up Christmas

Despite the sour rhetoric of our times and the efforts of so many to massage us into complacent ignorance, this is the message that we as a culture have placed, pressed and imprisoned in boxes built by self-serving philosophies, special interest groups gone rogue, and platforms born of greed and power.  This is the message that we find so aversive and chafing.  It is our single salvation, but we box it up anyway.  It is the only light in the darkness that we have foolishly come to call light.  It is the only thing big enough to be able to course the turbulent seas of our times and throw us the lifeline that we refuse as we wait for other promised lifelines that never come.  This is what we box up.  And such an action is ignorance of the greatest sort that will insure a death of the most painful sort.

We must take Christmas out of the cultural boxes into which we have thoughtlessly crammed it.  We must free it of the confines of our stupidity, we must release if from the filthy hands of our greed that shaped each box, and it must be freed of the bane of special interests that attempt to seal these boxes tight.  And once we’ve done all of that, we must burn every box to ash and cinders.

 

Christmas Can’t Be Boxed

Yet, the oddity of it all is that we really can’t keep Christmas in a box anyway.  We might ignorantly presume such power, but it is only an assumption and nothing more.  Despite our most robust efforts to ignore it, deny it, render it a fairy-tale, play it off as the invention of misty-eyed dreamers, and press it far off of the edges of a blind culture, Christmas remains what it is.  It will forever remain the only rescue mission that set out with enough power to actually rescue us.  No matter the propaganda and hype that we grant them, all other missions will fail…miserably.  And I would hate to meet my own death realizing that I was ignorant enough to box up the only thing that could have saved me. 

When Christmas has concluded and the celebrations have stilled, when the songs have fallen silent and the parties have ceased, leave Christmas out of the box that you can’t put it in anyway.  Let it be what nothing else can be.  Let it rescue you, your family, your children, your marriage, your community, and your world.  And I don’t believe that any of us want to put in any box anything that has the power to do that.  

 

Resources for Your Holiday Celebrations

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