Re-examining the spirit of Christmas can be helpful

Lou Marzeles
News Editor

     So we're on the cusp of Christmas. It falls on a Friday this year, rudely occurring at a time of week that only gives us one extra day off. It's so nice when it falls on a Thursday or a Tuesday, and everybody just knows-like some kind of collective intuition in the air-that you have a four-day weekend coming up.
     We'll make the best of it anyway, remembering those for whom the holiday provides only the briefest of respite from anxiety, if any. The Christmas season seems to evoke in us the same quality of spirit that gave rise to the first Christmas: unconditional love. It's virtually tangible, and it's profoundly sweet, and that's why we so often contemplate around this time how nice it would be to have the Christmas spirit all year round. Then come the parades and bowl games on New Year's, and another 365-day cycle of the earth around the sun begins, spinning in its wake that sense of rote routine that seems to comprise so much of our lives. Would that Christmas were eternal, we want to feel, even as we consider the sentiment another trite hope, one that will come true when swine acquire aerodynamic properties.
     Such is the nature of the human condition. But it's no less a part of the human condition to hope in the face of what cannot be hoped for. Christmas is eternal because its essential quality is never lost, though it can be sublimated. So many of us have had powerful personal experiences this year of the fragile transience of physical life, and we feel it again strongly this Christmas, but the heart holds qualities that do not-cannot-die. We do not accept that the spirit of Christmas is subject to the whims of the calendar or the vicissitudes of routine or the deadly agendas of force and fear. Christmas reminds us of the lovingness of supreme sacrifice for the benefit of mankind. Each of us, in our own way, as best we can, feels that same impulse, and it is always there.