Christmas Excerpt...

Our ward party last night didn't have Santa at the end like usual and I for one thought it was a great idea. Instead they showed a video of Jesus's birth put to music. It was a perfect reminder of the reason for the season. I came across this while looking at news and thought I'd post an excerpt by Hugh Nibley...

"The modern Christmas is a quest by the world to find something it lost. "There is a nostalgic sadness about Christmas," Nibley wrote.

The modern Christmas is like a small light in the darkness. "It is evidence of things not seen," Nibley wrote. "It is not the real thing, but the expression of a wish."

It is a beautiful wish. An expression of hope. "A brief, brave show of generosity and cheer."

For Nibley, the world's attempt at Christmas, like the ancient celebrations, is indeed a "demonstration of man's capacity for enjoying good and sharing it."

But it is also something more -- something that he thought Mormons should help to remind the world. Christmas is about sharing and goodness, but it is also about mankind's "helplessness to supply it from his own resources."

The world desperately wants Christmas to mean something.

But, the "great blessings we seek at Christmas are not of our own making," Nibley wrote. The everyday world is already of "our own making." What the world really seeks, what it really needs, "must come from another world."

Nibley called this realization a "moment of lucidity" when life becomes clear. Christmas is the moment when the world, "caught off-guard," realizes it needs something more -- something real.

"'Scrooge the man of business' can never go back again after his Christmas fling -- however ashamed he may be of it in the cold light of day it is too late to deny that he has shown 'Scrooge the man of the world' to be but a mask and an illusion," Nibley wrote.

Christmas rips off the world's mask.

"So the Latter-day Saints have always been the greatest advocates of the Christmas spirit; nay, they have shocked and alarmed the world by insisting on recognizing as a real power what the world prefers to regard as pretty sentiment," Nibley wrote.
Christmas without Christ is a "hollow mockery."

"If men REALLY want what they say they do, we have it," Nibley wrote, "but faced with accepting a real Savior who has really spoken with men they draw back, nervous and ill at ease."

It is safer for the world to cling to tinsel and sentimentality, but Christmas still awakes a sense of possibilities. Those possibilities rankle, but have in them a latent hope, according to Nibley. "For by celebrating Christmas the world serves notice that it is still looking for the Gospel."