Chaplain's Corner

It’s over, but is it? Another Christmas has come and gone, but I wonder how many ghosts of Christmases past will haunt our Christmas celebrations in the years ahead?

Of course it was Charles Dickens in His celebrated A Christmas Carol that first introduced us to the ghost of Christmas past. It was poor Ebenezer Scrooge’s Christmas ever nightmare where this ghost first appeared. But like all literature, generally beneath the story there is a reality that is being explored. Dickens’s was exploring the events of Scrooge’s life that made him the “Bah – Humbug” that he was. If we were to honestly and candidly reflect on the events of this past week, we may easily identify a few ghosts of Christmases past that “haunted” the celebrations that are just past. I would like to take a few moments of your time to reflect on some of these “ghosts” that commonly haunt Christmas celebrations.

First let’s take the “ghost of broken relationships”. If you are part of a family where there has been a marital separation or divorce you will know this ghost all too well. Holidays have a way of aggravating marital disharmony and as you celebrated this year, you may have had a hard time not remembering some of the conflicts and painful scene’s of a past relationship that ruined a few too many Christmases. But separation and divorce are not the only events that create space for this “ghost of Christmases past”.

There are those nasty family feuds that haunt our celebrations, especially at Christmas. Maybe it is the brother-in-law that always makes a scene. Or the sibling that decides not to come to the family gathering, shattering the image of an intact, happy family that you so deeply long for. Or maybe it is the long standing feud as to whose parents get Christmas morning and whose get Christmas eve? Or perhaps it is the heartache of a child’s rebellion that blew a past Christmas out of the water. Time does not heal all wounds and such events can give place to the “ghost of broken relationships” to haunt us each year when the Christmas season rolls around.

Second there is that pesky “ghost of over extravagance” that has us paying for last years Christmas almost until the time to begin thinking about next year’s Christmas. I know a person that could hardly stand Christmas with the family. Not because there was so little under the tree, but because Mom, in an effort to prove her love with extravagance would buy so many gifts but then  complained loudly all the way into the next summer because she was still paying for those gifts that she had put on credit.

For some this kind of Christmas-mania seems to overwhelm at least one member of the family resulting in Christmas being a time when the credit cards are run up to and over their limits, because “Well, don’t you want to have a nice Christmas?” Others in such family circles find the extravagance repulsive and as each years Christmas season approaches this “ghost of over extravagance” haunts the homes of those who experience such out of control spending.

Then there is that third kind of Christmas ghost, the “ghost of Christmas loneliness”. There is no other time of there year when there is this cultural expectation that everyone be connected to a big, loving family. It seems that all the Hallmark Christmas specials and so many of the other programs aired at Christmas have a fairy tale like tone to them in which even dysfunctional families are miraculously able to find a “happily ever after” by the time Christmas Day arrives. For very, very many the “ghost of Christmas Loneliness” is a very real visitor each Christmas season.

But let’s not forget the “ghost of Christmas oughtness”. Many, by the time New Years Day passes, are exhausted by all the festivities and obligations of the season. Long after the tree is put away and the decorations stripped from the home, some feel completely wiped out and they mutter to themselves, “Why do I let this happen every year?” There is a way in which the season pressures people into doing what they “ought” to do. But all too often the “ought to” has little to do with right and wrong, but everything to do with attempting to live up to every Tom, Dick and Harry’s expectation. You have been haunted by this Christmas ghost:  “well, we ought to go to so and so’s party.” “Oh, I guess we ought to go to your company’s Christmas party.” “Yuck, I hate going to that event but I guess we ought to go, everyone expects us to be there.” You can probably replay the tape of some of your “ought to” moments that seem to come up so often during the Holiday season.

OK, maybe one last ghost of Christmas past, the “ghost of Christmas’s not-so-sacredness.” Many of us grew up in the church. We know the theological significance of the biblical accounts of the birth of Jesus. We know that “Jesus is the reason for the season”. We decorate our homes with angels and shepherds and wise men. Some of us have replaced a tree with a Nativity Scene in an attempt to put “Christ back into Christmas”. We feel guilty over our failures to eradicate the secular from our Christmas celebrations; we wish we could some how escape the commercialism, Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman and Old Saint Nick. We try to observe the sacredness of the season in the midst of the commandment-breaking secularism that has become Christmas, but it seems the pressures are so overwhelming, so omnipresent, that we end up caving and we feel the haunting guilt of not sticking to our guns and preserving the sacredness of Christmas.

My, my – there certainly are many “ghosts of Christmases past” that we confront every year, each of them haunt us because we come, year after year after year with stuff in our lives that never get’s resolved. Sometimes it doesn’t get resolved because of our stubbornness, sometimes because of the stubbornness of others, sometimes because we are powerless to change the realities. But my hope in writing about these ghosts, so soon after this past Christmas is that we may begin the process of putting some of them to rest by acknowledging them, figuring out how we might be responsible in keeping them alive and then do what we can do to put these ghosts to rest so that maybe, just maybe when next Christmas approaches, there will be a few less “ghosts of Christmases past” to haunt us next Christmas.

If this happens, we may be able to make progress from being the Ebenezer Scrooge that “Bah Humbugs” the season and become the joyful, generous, full of grace Ebenezer that emerges at the end of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.