Quoted from Mary Bursting, by Douglas Jones:
Encapsulate all the colors, meanings, music, and history of World War II into one sentence, commas permitted. Now do it with a far more earth-shattering, far more complicated, more unspeakable event. That’s the tension of Christmas.
…I stand before the kids, wondering how to explain it. The words come out rickety, gap toothed. I can read and read to them but that’s never enough. Maybe I could set the whole house on fire in a searing white light with the darkest winter background, just a bit of star in the dining room, melt the neighborhood. That might come close. Instead I climb the ladder up the side of my house with my stupid little clinking lights; I loop and hang and wrap and pile them around as best I can. The electricity wheezes in the house, and the lights can be seen from two miles away; I tested. But I can’t stop; they’re never enough. It’s not fair. He gets to use glowing jellyfish and Texas lightning and Alpha Centauri, and I can only hang these pathetic glowing strings.
But Christmas insists. And so here in the north, during the darkest days of winter and death, this small town’s Christmas lights conspire together against the black night and start to reclaim reality. “And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. . . . That was the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world.”
