I love Christmas. Yes, there's a lot going on, and yes, (sigh) times are tough, and yes, I popped awake at three o'clock this morning for no reason other than "I finished a big project yesterday and that goes one of two ways, so congrats I guess," and couldn't get back to sleep: the post-Damascene Scrooge spirit is lacking in your humble correspondent this morning. But even when I don't "feel the season" in a Hallmark way, I feel it, from the sublime to the silly to the spiritual.

For Christmas is a spiritual time. This is true even - especially? - for many folks who don't tend to self-identify in public as "religious", a word which, in American spaces, unfortunately tends to mean some messy combination of "actively churchgoing", and "committed to a range of truth claims about supernatural matters to a degree that renders evidence irrelevant and discussion only allowed to the extent it channels participants further down the sales funnel of conversion." Lots of folks who don't regularly practice religion, if they grew up in a Christian context, will hesitate to call themselves religious or even spiritual if they can't say something like "Jesus is the son of God" without wanting to have a long sit-and-chat about each of those six words.

And I do think that's unfortunate, because the desire to sit and think and chat and feel and explore what those words (and others like them) could mean, and what we should do in the light of them, far from being incompatible with religion, is the heart of an awake and vital religious practice as I understand it—that desire is the gate to a rich human tradition of thought and feeling and living. A world in which the gate is barred from both sides is a world in which the people outside are denied powerful tools for understanding themselves and their place in a strange and often cold universe, and for organizing around that understanding, while the hearts and minds of those inside the gate are at risk of withering without the exercise and nourishment occasioned by deep contemplation and practice—like trees grow rootless without wind. So withered, they are easily led astray by the wicked, who embrace any tool they can use to get folks to follow them off a cliff and into the fire.

But as Halloween is a chance to get loose with our understanding of fear and darkness and death, Christmas a chance to get loose with our understanding of miracles, religion, transcendence, surprise. The usual spiritual-materialist objections (how does Santa deliver all those presents in one NIGHT) and the usual spirtiual-materialist claims (Santa IS Real!) both feel less sharp-toothed, and more like games, or anyway like prompts to contemplation; the question 'what relationship does this ritual have to the story of Christ in the manger, and what is THAT story all about' may be phrased dismissively, but it is also open ended and may even be sincere. In this one time of year we (many of us) do all this strange stuff. Why? And just in case we’re too busy present-shopping and arranging travel and sweating budgets to feel the spirit, well, the Charlie Brown Christmas Special is happy to remind us. And so are the tunes.

Because Christmas is also a musical time. Every year my family hears the Charlie Brown Christmas album wafting from the kitchen as I cook; every year Mariah Carey gets paid $3 million dollars in royalties for "All I Want for Christmas is You," nice work if you can get it; every year the collective brilliance of the bored-at-work produces a new pairing of Christmas song with unexpected melodic accompaniment. New-to-me this year is "The Night Before Christmas" set to the tune of Cake's "He's Going for Distance." I can't get enough of it, though the singer misses a trick in my opinion by sticking with "Distance" on the chorus instead of "He's going for Christmas." (My personal contribution to the genre is the observation that you can sing "War Pigs" to the tune of "Deck the Halls" and vice versa. "Generals gathered in their masses, fa la la la la, la la la laaaa, Just like witches at black masses, Fa la la la la, la la la laaaa". Oh, and "We Three Kings" scans more or less to "Far Over Misty Mountains Cold," you're welcome.)

Much as Christmas is a time when those who don't think of themselves as religious practice religion, it's also a time when those who don't think of themselves as musical practice music, from humming carols to group-singing Handel—when the mix of music in the atmosphere rises by about 15%. I think those two facts are related; music and religion are twinned and mutually arising; the earliest songs are teaching songs. This isn't just a Christian thing - American white protestantism is slightly to the left of the bell curve when it comes to musicality, though it does have rad tunes; for Confucius music and ritual performance are inseperable. And many of the great Christmas songs teach - or at least raise questions, or prompt reflection, in a way that I find more interesting than simple issues of propositional belief. Here are a few of my favorites.

(Max, did you write all that to introduce a bit where you suggest some Christmas tracks? First, yes, Second, well, also yes.)

Jackson Browne, The Rebel Jesus, Chieftains - Bells of Dublin

There were times in middle and high school where I would have been happy to give this song as my religious identity.I don't know that that's true any more but it's still pretty close. Browne here pushes at the wedge between the comforts and self-congratulation of the holiday, and the revolutionary, or rebellious, character of the message and messenger: those of us who are fortunate to have warm homes to gather in, gather there, keep warm, and bake cookies, as we celebrate two expectant parents sent from their home to a strange city in winter because of the tax policy of a capricious and distant emperor, a story of a baby delivered in an outbuidling and put to bed in a feed trough, who is nonetheless the most important person in the world. What are we to make of the contrast between their suffering and our comfort? Between what we enjoy now and the pain that surrounds us? And yet this isn't purely a finger-pointin' song. Browne sings "please forgive me if I seem to take a tone of judgment" - "in this life of hardship and of earthly toil we have need for anything that frees us" - one reason we gather in this way and tell this story is that we, all of us, feel the cold. We need to remember that light comes in darkness and that hope is found in unlikely places. We need to remember that there is always more to be done - and that the ones we gather with are the ones who stand beside us in the work.

Vienna Teng, The Athiest Christmas Carol

Another song weighing the question of what are we doing here exactly. I love the answers (though I can't imagine singing it as a carol). "It's the season of possible miracle cures" is the line that conveys the whole song for me. The Christmas season is a season for remembering and celebrating that things which don't happen, do happen. Not always, and yet: every day, if we are awake to the chance. Empires don't fall, until they do. The wicked are not cast down, until they are. The endless encroaching darkness does not give way to light, except it does. The spirit / power that sustains and creates and gives rise to the world is not present in our lives as an infant in a manger, not fully here as the humblest and weakest of beings, except... here he is. For me, that's one power that comes from the holiday's particular and peculiar marriage of the Christian progressive view of sacred history, in which things happen and the world is changed forever after, to the annual pagan round, where the light is reborn every year: things have changed, and yet the time of miracles is not past. We can be better than this. Even if it takes a miracle.

Bruce Cockburn, Shepherds

"They wake up suddenly in the night, and there is light."

This song is more of a picture-painting song than the others; it also might not work as well out of the context of the album, but if you've never heard Bruce Cockburn's Christmas, there's no time like the present - it’s a great range of spirituals and carols, including driving, mysterious versions of the Huron Carol, Riu Riu Chiu, and Down in Yon Forest that highlight the sublime into the holiday. And then, nestled right at the act 3/4 transition, is this gem, the album’s only original: an ecstatic vision of the angels' apparation to the shepherds, "clothed in more colors than the world can contain" - a reminder that through all the uncertainty, mystery, and portent, the myrrh in the casket, the certain knowledge of where this story goes and ends (or does it? nothing ever ends, Adrian...) - as the future gathers close, in this moment right now, there is light.

Take care of yourselves, all. I hope the hinge of the year treats you kindly, and that you treat one another the same way. I'll see you in the new year.