Christmas Greetings

Each year brings a holiday season more treasured and anticipated. Family is scattered more sparsely across the continental U.S., and harder to gather for any length of time (at least we're all in the same country; that's not something I take for granted anymore). There are more traditions and more activities and more meals than I know how to deal with. It's a terribly wonderful blessing, for these increasingly treasured times have also become more and more condensed. This year brought all five Stotz siblings (& spouses) together for only two days. The two days, and those preceding them, were packed to the gills with church and dinners, traveling and gift exchanges, game nights and snow playtime. It's been a most exhausting, most wonderful weekend with family.
Christmas greetings have been drifting about in place of the snow flurries missing from our weather forecast: "Happy Holidays" and "Merry Christmas", "Good to have you home" and "How wonderful to have family!". But the Christmas greeting that stopped me cold in my flurried and condensed holiday festivities was mistaken by many others as a misspelling:

Mary Christmas.

My uncle stripped my holiday spirit clean with his two-word status update. A greeting not shrouded by wrapping paper or bows, nor accompanied by sparkling punch served with Chex mix. A thought that bypasses the overprocessed, gaudily packaged box we've created to hold our stylized imagery of a glowing manger, glittering wise men, and haloed Mary & Joseph.

Mary + Christ.
A virgin mother + an immaculate Child, the Savior incarnate. 

We've gone overboard with our whitewashing of the Nativity story. We've cleaned the cattle slobber from the hay in the manger, set up stage lighting in the dim corners of the stable, and portrayed first-time parents as angelically cool, calm, and collected in the very worst of baby-is-coming situations. The barn floor is clean, swept in advance by the inn keeper in anticipation of Messianic guests, and the finest stall is saved for the birthing center; no livestock have to be pushed aside to make room. 

We've turned the Story into something clean and inviting and predictable. No longer do we find a stable birth miraculous, nor a messenger star worth our awe. We forget that this is more than a Hollywood or Norman Rockwell retelling of a fictional tale. It's become commonplace, just as Merry Christmas has. We've forgotten how miraculous and incredibly beautiful the concept of Immanuel is – God with us; God incarnate, God as man.

This Christmas, I'll greet you with a warm, very thankful, and very heartfelt greeting of merriness, joy, thanksgiving, and perhaps a renewed awe of Christmas miracles.
I wish you a Mary Christmas.