12/17/2025
Christmas is so utterly, obviously, incomparably glorious that satan can only try to eclipse it with shallow, empty, consumeristic nonsense. To celebrate a truly Christ-centered Christmas isn’t being religiously extreme - it’s to do justly before God - to give Him the honor and worship that is rightfully due Him for His glorious Incarnation. The world tries to dissolve Christmas into just a nebulous, vague social ritual or a happy feeling of nostalgia, togetherness and good will. The truth is that Christmas is a historical, metaphysical, and salvific event. At Christmas, the Church proclaims the most staggering claim ever made: the eternal God became man. Christmas is the beginning of the redemption of the entire created order, not a seasonal reminder to be nicer to one another.
Sentimentality is safe because it demands nothing of us. The Incarnation is dangerous because it demands everything.
By entering history as an infant, God sanctified the human body, family life,
labor, poverty, weakness, dependence,
and space and time itself.
Christmas declares that physical matter matters. That salvation is not an escape from the physical world but its restoration. Against every gnostic impulse, ancient or modern, the Church insists that God saves us through the flesh, not outside of it. The baby in the manger is already oriented toward Calvary. The feeding trough He lay in points to the Eucharist. The swaddling clothes foreshadow the burial shroud. Christmas is the opening act in the drama of humanity’s salvation.
The world reduces Christmas to “togetherness” to empty it of its meaning. Family time is good, but it is not the reason for Christmas. Rather, Christmas is the reason that family has meaning at all.
The world tries so hard to soften Christmas because the Incarnation is an act of war - God taking on human flesh to confront sin, dispose of death, and lay siege to the gates of hell.
