You don’t need to put a gift in a box and wrap it in fancy paper for it to be a gift. It’s still a thoughtful and generous gesture of love or appreciation.
But the wrappings add mystery, magic, and a key ingredient that makes it truly special: anticipation.
Anticipation is one of two things we’ve lost in our culture.
This year might have been a record. I began seeing Christmas lights the day after Halloween. This shouldn’t surprise me, for we are an impatient generation. Microwaving popcorn feels like it takes forever. We binge-watch entire television seasons in one sitting. We demand that the remote-controlled pillow fluffer we ordered today arrives tomorrow.
And yes, we put up Christmas lights the day after Halloween.
Our zeal for speed leads us to miss out on the gift of anticipation.
Remember the days when you’d use most of October to dream up myriad Halloween costume ideas before settling on the perfect one? Remember fantasizing about what sort of Valentine message you’d get from the classmate you secretly had a crush on? Remember using Herculean effort to try to fall asleep on Christmas Eve, even though visions of what might be in Santa’s bag made it impossible?
Anticipation is the electricity of childhood.
That space of not knowing was exciting, but also pretty torturous. As kids, however, there wasn’t much we could do about it. You could beg Dad to let you in on the surprise he announced was up his sleeve, but he’d never budge. And so you were forced to wait with your stomach tied up in knots, certain you’d die from the rising levels of giddy anticipation.
As adults, we like not knowing even less than we did as kids. It makes us feel powerless and out of control. But alas, now we have the power to do something about that harrowing netherworld of not knowing. And so we do. As is our modern-day custom, we eliminate one problem only to inadvertently create several more. (You’ve seen those pharmaceutical commercials in which the side effects seem worse than the original problem, haven’t you? And where exactly should one look for “oily discharge?”)
In our haste to cut to the chase and avoid the agonizing space of uncertainty, we discard one of the best parts of life.
We want all the magic and wonder of Christmas, and we want it right NOW, thank you very much.
This leads me to the other thing our culture has lost: a sense of enchantment and the supernatural.
Over the last few centuries, we’ve been methodically removing any remnant of the supernatural from our lives. Science can now explain what was once unexplainable. Humans have achieved remarkable breakthroughs in industry and technology. Who needs God when we’ve become our own saviors?
And yet, for all of our progress and all our knowledge, we remain disenchanted. We still crave magic, wonder, and a sense of the supernatural.
I suspect that’s why I saw Halloween decorations go up sooner than ever this year, the reason Christmas lights went up the day after Halloween, and why we hear Christmas music being played earlier and earlier: we yearn to experience the supernatural.
But because we’ve lost the plot, we desperately reach for the things we think will bring it. We garnish our lives with twinkling lights, evergreen trees, and nostalgic melodies of Christmas carols, but they are merely the trimmings. It all looks and sounds and smells like Christmas, while God remains on the sidelines.
We have wrapped our boxes in fancy paper and shiny bows, but there is nothing inside.
(And so perhaps next year we’ll try putting up the lights around Labor Day…)
The Christmas story, of course, is dripping with the supernatural. A virgin giving birth. God becoming a man. Angels are showing up everywhere, from the proclaiming of His coming to the rejoicing at His arrival.
Fortunately, the Church, in her infinite wisdom, has given us the season of Advent. It keeps us centered on the supernatural, with all its talk of mysterious prophecies and visits from angels. And it gives us the gift of anticipation, which is hard to find these days.
It makes us wait.
Within the agonizing delay, we are called to prepare our hearts and ready ourselves for a gift too marvelous to comprehend.
Then, when the time is right, and not a moment before, we are given a package. It’s resplendently wrapped with the kind of decadent, thick, gold paper your Grandma got for special occasions from a place without “mart” in the name. And luxurious velvet red bow embraces the box which is not empty…
…but rather contains within it the very best gift ever.
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