TFD: On the 17th Day of Christmas

I made a lot of noise last time about how Christmas was over... but truthfully, there are still little vestiges of the season left around. I can't really say a lot of it is conscious, of course; the Christmas tree is still lying on its side in the side yard because I dragged it out just before we left for our Christmas-break vacation stay at camp. There are miscellaneous decorations here & there that just didn't get put away. The wrapping paper is still piled up in the corner of my office (although I did finally fold up the worktable a couple days ago. Some time soon I will take the folded table out of the office, too).

And despite all my protestations to the contrary, all the Christmas music is still loaded up in my iPod, as well as iTunes. Before Christmas, I was doing a constant shuffle of all the holiday songs; now, at least, I've returned to the full list shuffle. As a result, the Christmas music acts like a little punctuation -- I could say that it's the nutmeg in the eggnog, but that's a holiday-only metaphor. In any case, instead of the whole dish, it's just the spice, which in its way makes me "hear" it a little more.

I tried through the season (the "real" season) to rate my songs using the iPod's 1-5 star system, and it may be that I decide that the 4- and 5-star songs are worth keeping year-round. That will probably almost automatically include most or all of Steven Curtis Chapman's two Christmas albums.

It seems like every time I mention Christmas music, I come back to SCC. One of his songs hit me in a special way this year, to such an extent that I convinced myself that it gave me a fresh insight. I've had some time to think about it, and I guess it falls a little short of, you know, C.S. Lewis-level inspiration -- but I'll share it anyway.

The song that brought Christmas home to me this time was "Our God Is with Us":

Our God is with us
Emmanuel
He's come to save us
Emmanuel
And we will never face life alone
Now that God has made himself known
As father and friend, with us through the end
Emmanuel

(You can hear the song, and in fact the whole album, if you go here and click 'play' next to The Music of Christmas)

It's always been one of my all-time favorites, but one day it hit me at a new angle: he's come to save us. And instead of the conventional sense of the word -- those who believe in him don't have to go to hell -- I took it quite literally. I imagined myself in a lot of trouble, maybe even being held captive, when suddenly the SWAT team arrives to rescue me. OK, I guess in this case it's more like the SWADDLE team, but the image of Jesus coming because it was the only way to bail me personally out of danger made Christmas a little more, I don't know, urgent -- not just another Silent Night.

Don't get me wrong, I love the Silent Night. I love Joseph standing nearby trying to keep his head from exploding with everything that's happened to him. I love the shepherds saying, "Wait -- you're telling us the most important news ever?" I love Mary watching it all wide-eyed, "treasuring all these things up in her heart" (there's a blog I'd pay to read). And I saw one of my favorite Biblical phrases on a Sunday school bulletin board this week: it was a Birth Announcement for Jesus, and on the line for "When:" it said, "In the fullness of time". I wish I could say that's why this post is so "late" -- I'm just trying to achieve the fullness of time for it.

But alongside all that we have the image of Jesus arriving at just the right time -- albeit not in the most powerful or glamorous fashion -- to save us from a crisis... and that, much more than shepherds or wise men or donkeys, is a piece of Christmas I can take with me all year long.