A Devotion from Stanley Grenz
Drive-Through Christmas
Stanley Grenz
“On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me.” Tony Bennett’s voice wove its subtle
magic throughout the shopping mall. “How appropriate,” I thought, as I watched the shoppers
scurry from store to store. The advertisements promised “just the right gifts at just the right
price,” allowing us to “give like Santa and save like Scrooge.”
As I listened, I was struck with how we have turned Christmas around—not so much by
commercializing the season, but through something deeper. Our McWorld of drive-through
expectations has replaced patient waiting, followed by heartfelt joyous celebration, with the
idolatry of instant gratification. This is poignantly evident in the fusillade of renditions of “The
Twelve Days of Christmas” to which we are subjected this time of year.
The ancient Western church devised a rhythmic cycle for the celebration of Christ’s
incarnation. At the center was Advent, the 20-plus days beginning on the fourth Sunday before
Christmas Day. By fasting and abstaining from public festivities, Christians were to prepare for
the holy day by being drawn into the sense of longing for Messiah’s coming felt by generations
of God’s faithful people.
This heightened sense of anticipation would, in turn, give way to overwhelming joy and
festive celebration when Christmas Day finally came. Only then followed the 12 days of
Christmas, climaxing on January 6 with Epiphany, the commemoration of the visit of the Magi.
As members of the fast-food generation, we have become so eager to get to Christmas that
we bypass Advent. Whereas our forebears enjoined fasting and reflection, we try to enjoy days
filled with more Christmas festivities than we can endure. Christmas has displaced Advent on
our calendars.
But our bypassing of Advent runs deeper—altering our attitude to the story of Christ’s birth.
We know how the story ends. Knowing the end of the story so well, we want to rush through
the long and tortuous details of how God prepared a people—of how “God sent his Son … when
the time had fully come” Gal. 4:4. Rather than entering into the sense of expectation lying at
the foundation of the narrative of Christ’s entrance into the human plot-line, we read only the
story’s glorious climax. Rather than savoring the plaintive mood of “O Come, O Come
Emmanuel,” we immediately want to hear a robust version of “Joy to the World, the Lord Is
Come.” In short, we have our Christmas early and create a drive-through Christmas.
The irony of our situation is that in our rush toward Christmas, we end up truncating the
celebration. Once December 25 is past, so is the holiday. Stretching the 12 days of Christmas
until January 6 seems entirely out of place. In fact, we have eliminated the need to do so by
moving the adoration of the Magi to our early Christmas: we efficiently (and ahistorically) place
the wise men at the manger next to the shepherds. We cannot even stretch Christmas to
December 26, for Boxing Day entices us to take our unwanted, reboxed gifts back to the stores
or to buy boxes of the sale goods that draw us out in droves for one of the biggest shopping
days of the year.
So we have our twelve-plus days of Christmas, just like the song says. But in our impatience
born from the lure of instant gratification, we have transposed them. Christmas now precedes
December 25. This may allow us to avoid the stressful waiting, the longing expectation and the
forlorn cry of our forebears. But it also precludes us from sharing the exuberant joy of that first
Christmas, for we cannot truly sing “Joy to the World” unless we have thoroughly rehearsed “O
Come, O Come Emmanuel.”