What are you expecting for Christmas? Even if Christianity is not your religious tradition, the season can still hold great expectations.
They may be about the “perfect gift,” given or received, as advertised everywhere at this time of year.
They may be about the perfect gathering of family and friends in a beautifully decorated home for the holidays with a festive table looking just like a magazine cover.
They may be about a perfectly simple celebration with rich and sustainable practices of deep meaning.
Without judging between these or other traditions, this season can hold great expectations.
In contrast, life’s struggles don’t take a break for Christmas.
For those experiencing difficulties — with limited income or poor housing, looking for work or stricken with grief, struggling with illness or the trials of old age, coping with loneliness within or without relationships or being far from home — whatever the ways we and others hurt, expectations for this time of year may be little or none.
But the season itself can significantly increase the struggle and pain because of expectations that it would be different.
Great expectations and great struggles — Christmas seems so heavily invested that it can amplify both.
The original Christmas story was also about stuggle and expectations.
It’s the story of a peasant couple — a pregnant teenager and her reluctant but stalwart fiancé — already or soon to be refugees having to travel in the late stages of her pregnancy, without housing or hospitality at their place of destination nor a safe place or any health care. The woman gives birth in a livestock shelter and the newborn is wrapped in torn pieces of cloth and placed in a feed trough of straw for warmth. It’s such a very poor first Christmas that anyone could have expected to be better.
And there were and came to be the greatest expectations for this newborn.
Angels and sheep herders proclaim him to be God’s own child, born to save the world from its broken self, by the perfect love of God and the eternal hope of peace on earth and goodwill toward all people.
What should we expect for Christmas?
Maybe great expectations for both the most perfect Christmas in the world and the great and very real suffering and struggle for many in our world at Christmas and every time, should have us expecting to be surprised.
Expecting and striving for the perfect Christmas, like expecting and striving for the perfect life, likely ends in disappointment and potentially in a self-centred and bitter existence.
And even in the midst of life’s great struggles, the surprise of something we never could have expected is part of the promise of the first Christmas.
Expecting to be surprised in this season may be as true to the spirit of the first Christmas as we can be.
And it just may open us to one another in such a way that for everyone it is more than we could have expected.
Rev. Lyle McKenzie is pastor of Lutheran Church of the Cross of Victoria and part-time chaplain in Multifaith Services at the University of Victoria.
