The Hard Work of Christmas: A Guest Post by Nancy Franson

Each year I make traditional Swedish Pepparkakor for Christmas, and each year doing so is one of my least favorite tasks. Working from a family recipe handwritten by my sister-in-law, I roll and cut out nearly a hundred thin ginger cookies; a job which keeps me on my feet for several hours. I wish I could cut the recipe in half and make fewer cookies, but it calls for only a single egg and I have yet to figure out how to cut a raw egg in half. Although I enjoy them, Pepparkakor are hardly my favorite cookie. The dough is dry, crumbly, and hard to work with. The older I get, and the more excess weight I carry on my hips, the more my joints object to the hours I spend standing at the counter rolling out crumbly dough.

So why do it? Although I love preparing for Christmas, I can allow the work to become exhausting. If I dare to tell myself the truth, I know that behind all the effort, energy, and expense I invest in my Christmas celebrations, I’m really just trying to create an experience and make happy memories. Somehow I must think I can recapture those “happy golden days of yore.” I imagine my efforts might be able to create an atmosphere of “peace on earth and goodwill toward men” among those in my home and gathered around my table.

The problem is, I’m not sure there ever were happy golden days of yore. As I think back to Christmases past, I remember the year my baby daughter was inconsolable because she was cutting teeth. Another year we had to evacuate our home, leaving behind newly unwrapped gifts, because our furnace was belching black smoke. And one Christmas, just as my family gathered around the table for dinner, we received word of the death of my husband’s grandmother.

No matter how much work I put into the celebration of Christmas, I am incapable of creating a merry one.

And although the song tells us, “There’s no place like home for the holidays,” home can also be a place where unresolved conflicts and lingering tensions reside. This year as I wait for my adult children to come home for Christmas, I am keenly aware that our family dynamics mirror those which are a staple of holiday-themed sitcoms and movies. I fear I could easily slip into old patterns of nagging, criticizing, and preaching; treating my adult children as if they were still children. Patterns of behavior and family dynamics change slowly, if at all, apart from the work of transforming grace.

For me, the tasks of of trimming the tree, shopping for gifts and, yes, even baking the Christmas Pepparkakor aren’t the difficult work of celebrating the holiday. The hard labor of Christmas comes in daring to believe the truth of the story, that the incarnation of God makes things like love, forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation possible and real. The hard work of Christmas asks me to live in the reality that Christ came as a baby, offering the gift of transforming grace.

Actually, this hard work of Christmas isn’t really hard at all. It’s impossible. “Apart from me,” said Christ, “you can do nothing.” So when I attempt this hard work of incarnating the incarnation, of living the love of Christ and loving those around me well, and as I fail as I am so prone to do; Christ calls me to receive his gift anew. He reminds me that I am able to love only because He came, demonstrating that He loved me first. He invites me to believe that His forgiveness and transforming grace are real and available to my family and to me. He dares me to believe I don’t live in a holiday movie or sitcom. I live with imperfect people in a fallen world plagued by heartache and sin; a world into which a baby was born in order to make all things new.

Each year I bake traditional Swedish Pepparkakor for Christmas, but not out of duty or obligation. I bake them because my mother enjoys them, and I love my mother. It’s a small gesture, a simple gift offered in love. But the labor of rolling out crumbling cookie dough becomes, for me, an affirmation of faith. Through a simple gift of ginger cookies I am privileged, in a small way, to incarnate the love of Christ; affirming that I believe the story is true.

Nancy, thank you for gracing us with this reflection today -- I am so very grateful for your friendship!

Please visit Nancy at her blog, Out of My Alleged Mind, and follow her on Twitter. You will certainly be glad you did!!

{that's Nancy, on the right, with Deidra and me at the Relevant 2011 conference! She was just as wonderfully zany in person as she is online!}