Martina Purdy
My neighbour’s Christmas display has been giving me a much needed smile, but perhaps not as he intended. His holiday garden features giant blow-ups of two cartoon characters, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, and a snowman, I have dubbed Olaf, in honour of the Disney snowman.
Every morning, in the run-up to Christmas, I have come round the corner, and glanced to see if this pair were still standing. More often than not, the Grinch, or Olaf, or both, were lying face down on the ground, quite deflated. “Perhaps one too many in the local pub,” I would chuckle to myself.
By evening they were usually back on their feet and I would recall the Advent scripture: “Stand erect, your liberation is at hand!”
Metaphor
Now, during these Twelve Days of Christmas, I am starting to think that the Grinch and Olaf are a metaphor for December 25. Perhaps they have something profound to teach us, something about our own deflated emotions when our expectations of the perfect Christmas fall flat, along with the false notion that we have to have it all together when it comes to love and family.
Christmas, like all great love stories, has been truly romanticised.
St Francis gave us the crib in the Thirteenth Century and Frank Capra, It’s a Wonderful Life in the Twentieth Century.
Of course, Christmas promises us a happy ending, but we forget the suffering in between this life and the next, and the reality that love is far from perfect in this fallen world. Maybe our sanitised stables celebrating the birth of true love should come with the scent of the first Christmas? In a cave with sheep and other animals, the smell was definitely not cinnamon and spice.
Disney’s Olaf is the perfect cartoon snowman, who nobly declares:
“Some people are worth melting for!”
But sometimes, if we are honest, we can be more like the Grinch, desperate to flee up a mountain with only Max the dog for company.
One of the grimmest things I ever read was that American family lawyers cynically call the first working Monday after Christmas, “Divorce Monday.” It is apparently their busiest day – ironic, given that Christ comes to reconcile us to God and to each other.
There is a reason Pope Francis gave us a prayer to the Holy Family, advising us to contemplate Jesus, Mary and Joseph”
Though Ireland still has one of the lowest divorce rates in Europe, it is on the rise. And, according to the experts, the roots of ‘divorce Monday’ are most likely found in financial pressures or feelings of deflation when relationship cracks get wider at Christmas. One legal website suggested that these pressures – coupled with New Year’s resolutions – “seem to push couples towards marital breakdown …”
Christmas, without its true meaning, can leave us feeling deflated – and drive us to extremes. So can New Year’s resolutions. This is especially true when we seek to fill ourselves with very poor substitutes for Christ, or aim, with our own strength, to build ourselves up, so we can become more perfectly balanced creatures in a world of unbalanced creatures.
There is a reason Pope Francis gave us a prayer to the Holy Family, advising us to contemplate Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
His prayer to the Holy Family is a plea that our own families will become places of communion, places of comfort and healing, so families never again experience violence, rejection and division.
True love
As the world moves on from Christmas all too quickly, it is easy to forget that New Year’s Day falls on the eighth day of Christmas, when our true love, according to the traditional song, gives us ‘eight maids a milking’. These represent the beatitudes, given to us by Jesus in Matthew Chapter 5, and point us to a beautiful life. But how many of us would resolve in 2025 to be poor, or to be reviled?
Christ – who teaches us that we cannot live this blessed, beautiful life without him – arrives on the first day of Christmas, sent by our true love, God, the Father. He sends his son so we can be filled with love, so we can live without limit, so we can be free.
I’m going to miss Olaf and the Grinch when they go, but as I round the corner each day, I’m hoping to remember the lesson of how to stand erect: the balance in my life depends on God’s love, and how well I love God first and my neighbour as myself.
Let’s face it, without the balance, we can become Grinch-like, puffed up with pride, and doomed to fall, like deflated creatures, face down in the dirt.
This Christmas, in a world of martyrs, I’ve been contemplating just how strange Christianity really is. What other religion would celebrate the birth of a saviour one day, and the brutal murder of Stephen, one of his followers the next? Then there’s the Feast of the Holy Innocents, slaughtered by Herod! How mysterious that Christmas joy and sorrow have been together from the start. Perhaps that’s the point. Christmas is not meant just to be merry; it is meant to be bittersweet.
I hope your church, like mine, was packed more than usual this Christmas. “C & E” Catholics is a rather sniffy term to describe those that come only at Christmas and Easter but they are very welcome! I recall a really committed parish priest, a man who had a wonderful sense of humour, and would tease the C & Es. “We do this every week you know,” he would say with a smile before the final blessing. Cue nervous laughter. Venerable Fulton Sheen, the famous American bishop, once made a rather astute observation that the churches are most full when God is at his most vulnerable: at Christmas, when he is a helpless babe in swaddling clothes and on Good Friday, when he has just been killed off.