Embracing the Mysteries…of Christmas

For my cousin, Linda, forever open to wonderment

December 1, 2023

In December, amidst the lights and twinkling glitter, bopping inflated Santas and Grinches, fluttering flags and brightly lit trees adorning our homes and storefronts—lies the still, quiet heart of the season.

Silent night, holy night.

The deepest, darkest time of the year (in the Northern Hemisphere, that is) casts a spell of mystery despite our, sometimes, frenetic attempts to illuminate it away. The mystery of Christmas time is born in our longest nights. When the chill of evening draws us home to warmth and light as the ice-blue shadows of dusk creep ever closer around our days.

For many of us, our first experience with the mysterious side of Christmas is connected with that white-bearded man in the bright red suit who, somehow, knows all of our secrets. As the old song goes:

“He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!”

Now, that’s a chilling thought.

And, although we sometimes approached one of his false-bearded incarnations with equal parts trepidation and hope as we whispered our Christmas gift wishes into his ear, we knew he had the power to already know our dreams since he was the all-seeing, all-hearing, all-knowing Santa Claus.

The next mystery we encounter (and do so for the rest of our lives!) is what we will discover once we’ve unwrapped those presents around the Christmas tree—or who drew our name in the Secret Santa gift exchange. What glories lie beneath those curly ribbons and candy-striped paper as we are reminded that anticipation is half the fun?

And then there is the mystery (and I’ll quote another familiar Christmas song) of “scary ghost stories…of long, long ago.” Victorian England was a hotbed of spooky tales told by crackling firesides. Perhaps the one we remember the most vividly and retold each year by way of books, stage plays, musicals, and movies is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—with its “Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come.”

As a writer of ghost stories, I feel inspired and quite at home with the supernatural mysteries of the season, when the veil between our two worlds seems to thin, and spirits of those passed on draw near. (The second book in my middle-grade series, Zephyr Stone and the Haunted Beach House, actually takes place at Christmas time.)

That brings me to the greatest mystery of all—the very source and starting point of Christmas. On crystal-clear winter nights, when I gaze into the inky-dark sky with its sparkling points of light—those millions and billions of glittering worlds, unknown—I marvel that, in such a universe, a spark of divinity made its way to our small, blue planet. As one of my favorite poets, Christina Rossetti (another Victorian, I might add) reminds us in a poem that has been set to music:

Love came down at Christmas,

 Love all lovely, Love Divine,

Love was born at Christmas,

Star and Angels gave the sign…

To close this little essay, I quote another great writer, Dylan Thomas, as he concludes A Child’s Christmas in Wales:

Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down. I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

Merry Christmas to you all, and may you “sleep in heavenly peace.”

Kathryn