Big faith in a merry little Christmas

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas was a popular Christmas song written during the midst of World War II (1943) and first warbled by Judy Garland in the 1944 MGM musical Meet Me in St Louis. Garland’s version started with the lines:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.

There’s also a line about making the yuletide gay.

And yes…these days a gay yuletide is probably a thing.

Despite the perhaps deluded belief that next year all our troubles will magically disappear, what’s most foreign about this particular song is the charming notion that your Christmas be little; an adjective that has fallen from favour in the eight decades since the song was scribed.

Nowadays, in the era of Mega-malls, Macca’s Mega-Meals, McMansions and McSUVS, the mere notion of anything “little” is ridiculously quaint, if not anathema to most people.

And this definitely applies to Christmas, where the more “maxtreme” the better.

Roy Morgan forecast that Australians will spend $6.7 billion in the four days of Black Friday/Cyber Monday, an increase of 5.5 per cent over the same time last year.

And we can safely say a lot of that cash went towards buying toys to put beneath the tree. According to the Australian Retailers Association, toys and games were the most sought-after gifts for Christmas 2023.

When I was a child, I was happy to get an Evel Knievel doll, an Etch A Sketch and bag of Darrell Lea Rocky Road.

Kids these days want a PlayStation 5, a Barbie Dream House with elevator and pool-slide, a play kitchen with a working sink, a drone and a LEGO set of the castle from Wicked. And they want it all.

I’m not suggesting that we go back to gifting our children with just an orange in a sock, but our faith suggests a more modest spirit to the season that takes its inspiration from the babe of Bethlehem and the “littleness” of the Holy Family.

As we celebrate the Solemnity of the Nativity of our Lord, the glory of God manifests itself in the poverty of a manger and the littleness of circumstance. Our hearts are made light not by an ethic of accumulation but the economy of communion with God-made-man.

When we celebrate the birth of our Saviour, we can keep in mind that telling contrast between that inn “where there was no room for them” and the quarried-out space beneath a peasant house where Jesus was born.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us:

Jesus was born into a humble stable, into a poor family. Simple shepherds were the first witnesses to this event. In this poverty heaven’s glory was made manifest. (CCC: 525)

There was nothing big or lavish about that first Christmas. Even Bethlehem itself was a little town at the time of Christ’s birth; with a population that archaeologists estimate at around 300 people.

And so, the nativity saw a little baby born in a little stable in a little town and surrounded by his little family. It was all so beautifully small and simple.

The simplicity was the very point.

Pope Benedict XVI writes in Jesus of Nazareth—The Infancy Narratives:

“From the moment of his birth, he belongs outside the realm of what is important and powerful in worldly terms. Yet it is this unimportant and powerless child that proves to be the truly powerful one, the one on whom ultimately everything depends.” (Page 67).

Our Saviour’s birth in a humble little stable, tells us that wealth, possessions, excess, are not as important as our communion with Him.

And it our relationship with Jesus that we should be celebrating at Christmas. Not by filling our lives with stress and stuff, but by filling our hearts with grace and thanksgiving.

Of course, we should celebrate the Solemnity of the Nativity of our Lord, and we should celebrate it well.

There should be a prayer and singing, good wine and fraternity, love and laughter. We are filled with joy, because this is the day that a tiny child was sent to be with us and save the world.

But eschew the temptation to make everything bigger. Bigger gifts, bigger credit card bills, bigger bling.

And have yourself a merry little Christmas…