Christmastide and A Space for Our Sadness

Sometimes Christmas joy is laced with crushing grief. The first celebrants of Christmas felt it too.

Photo Credit: Unsplash

Hello, it’s me. Did you think I stopped writing? Bet you didn’t think I still existed in this space! Probably most of you didn’t notice—and I’m not offended by that one bit. We’re all in information overload these days. But I did hear from some of you, and I didn’t fall off the Substack planet. I just got sucked into the “first semester back to the classroom vortex.” I also finished up edits on my next book (coming September 2025!) Tomorrow I can say, “it’s coming this year!” And I signed a contract to write a children’s book (more on that soon).

It was a full semester, which meant writing fell to the wayside—the very thing I was committed to not doing when I started my Substack. But then again, I didn’t know a lot of things in September 2023. I didn’t know I would enter the classroom as a public high school teacher. I didn’t know I would write another book. Even as we end 2024, there were a lot of things I thought I would “know” by now that still lack clarity. Maybe you feel the same way. Zora Neale Hurston once wrote, “there are years that ask questions and years that answer.” For me, 2023 and 2024 felt like a mixture of both. But I’m here writing, reflecting on some things I’ve learned. And I plan to keep writing in 2025, so thanks for sticking with me.

Up until 18 months ago, I was a committed Southern Baptist. But because of my Baptist roots, I’ve spent little time considering other church practices surrounding the Advent season. Recently, I listened to a podcast where the host and his guests talked about the twelve days of Christmas. The host is an Anglican, a tradition that feels deeply meaningful to me even if we haven’t landed there for now. In the Anglican church, they celebrate Christmastide, which is the time on the church calendar after Christmas Day, ending on January 5. I’ll be honest, I thought the twelve days of Christmas was just a song we sang at school sing-a-longs. I’m glad I was wrong. There is so much to learn in Christmastide! One aspect I particularly appreciate is how the twelve days of Christmas continue the biblical narrative in the order of the canon. It means we read the stories in the order they appear. We don’t read about the Magi before Christmas Eve. We rush past the stories because Christmas is over, and we’ve got a new year to prepare for. Christmastide slows us down.

Over the last few years, I’ve tried to reconcile the Christmas narratives that continue after Christ’s birth, like Anna and Simeon receiving the Christ in the temple and the journey of the Magi to visit a toddler Jesus. These are familiar Christmas stories, but they happen after the birth of Jesus. Christmas Day is the beginning of their stories, yet we often tell them before. Of course, there is a biblical literacy component that goes along with telling these stories in the order they appear in Scripture, and subsequently on the church calendar. It’s also the reason all my wise men are conveniently placed away from the manger in my nativities at my house—on the night Christ was born they weren’t in the stable, they were far off.

But there is another story that comes after Christ’s birth that rarely gets a mention in our Advent sermon series or Christmas Eve messages. It’s what happens after the Magi visit the Savior. If you’re familiar with the story, you know Herod gave them a job after they found the child. They were to return to him with his location. But Herod didn’t want to worship Jesus. He wanted to kill him. The Magi don’t return to Herod and instead flee to their homeland. And Jesus and his family escape to Egypt. But the rest of the toddler boys in Bethlehem aren’t so fortunate. The story is so tragic some headings in our Bibles call it the “massacre of the innocents.” It’s a full-scale slaughter of helpless toddlers and infants.

Poor Bishop Hooper captures the horror of this scene in their song, Weeping in Ramah. It’s worth listening to if you have the time.

Today I read Matthew 2:1-18 to the boys at lunch, as a new tradition of reflecting on Christmastide. I asked them how the Magi felt when they saw Jesus and then asked them how Herod felt. And when I asked them how they felt after we read the entire account from the visit of the Magi all the way to the slaughter of the innocents. Their response—“we’re sad. It’s just sad.”

It doesn’t make sense, really. Christmas is about joy. It’s about life in Christ’s name. It’s about peace on earth and goodwill to men. It’s about the reversal of the curse. Even the Magi, and every other character who comes to worship Jesus, respond with joy. And yet, here in Matthew all you hear are wails from bereaved mothers. All you hear are the deafening screams of parents who were caught unaware, precious sons ripped from their arms. Did Christ come for them? Did he come to “make his blessings flow” to them? Was he really “born that men no more may die”? This story is such a crushing addition to an otherwise joyful time in scripture. The joy of Christmas is overshadowed by the stench of death and the wails of grief.

I think we miss something profound when we don’t celebrate Christmastide—or at least don’t recount these stories alongside the ones of great joy. Perhaps you celebrated Christmas, the birth of our Savior, and yet they find yourself destroyed by grief, or broken by the curse in this world. There are many who feel the strange mixture of overwhelming joy laced with soul-crushing loss. Christmas is not just for the happy, it’s for the grief stricken too. Christmas is not just about your prayers being answered, it’s about the ones who take a turn for the worst, and you’re left picking up the pieces.

Christmastide lets you sit with both realities. It lets you carry the joy of Anna, who waited decades for God to answer her prayer in the final hours of her life. And it lets you cry out like the mothers in Ramah—weeping for the losses that never lose their sting.

The older I get the more I feel the ache of Christmas. Every person in the Christmas story was called to some sort of suffering—whether it was the pain of lifelong infertility (Zechariah and Elizabeth), being outcast for your pregnancy (Mary and Joseph), or being bereft of your children simply because you had a son (like the women in Bethlehem). There was joy at the arrival of the Christ, but he calls us to no less than what he too will suffer.

We feel that weight at Christmas—and in the days after. He will one day break the curse, until then we wait, looking for signs of light wherever it can be found. Morning is coming, and then our mourning will be over for good. Come, Lord.