Tuesday, December 29, 2020
The Rev. Nathaniel Bourne
Christmas Traditions
Traditions are not static. They change and evolve, grow and expand, or shrink to fit new contexts and new life stages. That’s become even more clear to me over the past week, reading reflections from this community and living through a Christmas unlike any before. Some things were unchanged. Nicole and I went through the rituals of putting up our tree, decorating it, and exchanging gifts with one another. We played our favorite Christmas music and baked cookies. Other things were completely different. This will likely be the last time for a long time I’m able to spend all afternoon on Christmas Eve making an elaborate dinner. It will hopefully be the last Christmas service I officiate in front of an empty Church.
This was our third Christmas as a married couple, and we’re still figuring out what our Christmases will look like. We come from different families and different cultures. We each brought into our marriage assumptions of what Christmas should look like, feel like, taste like, and smell like. But there’s no way our Christmases together can replicate the Christmases of our childhood. Something new is emerging, something that is uniquely ours. It draws from the traditions that have been passed down, but it adapts those traditions into a new way of doing things.
We’re not alone in that. Christmas is all about traditions evolving and changing. Each of the Gospel writers focuses on different facets of Jesus’ birth. The Church’s celebration of the Feast of the Incarnation has changed dates and the rituals on this day look different all over the world. In so many places the traditions around Christmas have adapted to the community that celebrates and the place where they are celebrating. All over the world followers of Christ find ways for the story of a miraculous birth in a stable to speak to their present day lives. That is the gift of tradition – for the wisdom of the past to be made new in our present moment, to take what we have received and give it new life. I pray that for the rest of this Christmas season and into this new year, the Holy Spirit will guide us in that work, helping us to reimagine how all our traditions can find new life.