I wish I could remember the day I learned that not everyone celebrated a merry Christmas.
I remember Dad and I were relaxing in a toasty, comfortable vehicle outside a store, where Mom was purchasing some last-minute items for a yuletide party.
And I remember that I anticipated a merry celebration of gifts, jokes and food.
But the woman on the radio was not.
According to the song she sang, she was pleading for her boyfriend or husband to return for Christmas.
Surprised — and perhaps even slightly annoyed — at this sour intrusion, I immediately and carelessly mocked the singer for marring my festivities with melancholy.
Dad, however, simply responded that not everyone will or can celebrate a merry Christmas — and his words now echo in my heart.
(Years later, I heard “Wonderful Christmastime,” another song that inspires mourning, only because I learned that the song actually exists — and that people actually like it.)
Today, I still wish people a merry Christmas. However, considering the struggles and trials this world endures, perhaps Christians can more fully share the blessings of the incarnation if they also wish people a “Mary” Christmas.
“Now when (the shepherds) had seen Him, they made widely known the saying which was told them concerning this Child. And all those who heard it marveled at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart,” Luke records in his gospel (emphasis added).
Mary might not have celebrated a “merry” Christmas after traveling more than 90 miles while pregnant and under the shadow of a murderous monarch, but it seems she still treasured the eternal, life-changing promises of Jesus’ birth.
And people today can too when they sacrifice some seasonal pursuits to stop, study the Word, and meditate on not just the account of Jesus’ birth, but His life, His death, His resurrection, His reign and His return.
And they can when they, like Mary, invite these promises to penetrate their hearts with the hope of not just a Savior, but a Sovereign as well.
“For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord,” Luke quotes the angel (emphasis added).
This angel wasn’t christening Jesus with a last name when He called Him the Christ. He used the Greek word for the Hebrew word “Messiah,” or the anointed one.
He announced the birth of a king, the Son of David, and the beginning of a kingdom far more glorious than the Kingdom of Israel or any earthly kingdom before or since.
And this King still reigns to make every night holy through resurrection, Holy-Spirit-flowing power and truth.
“But now the righteousness of God apart from the Law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe,” the Apostle Paul writes in Romans.
But Paul didn’t necessarily just refer to some abstract “status” for believers in which God sees them as righteous. Paul referred to vibrant faithfulness that springs from forgiveness and that discerns and works out God’s will each day. He referred to a born-again life that can overcome and redeem the less-than-merry circumstances.
And even when God does not wield this power to change those circumstances, He’ll use them to one day reap eternal blessings, and because of this, Paul could triumphantly write, “Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.”
Because of this power, Peter could write, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,” and, “In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be, you have been grieved by various trials.”
Because of this power, Peter, Paul and Mary could with the world a “Mary” Christmases.
And I too wish the lost, the least and the lonely a Mary Christmas to all, and to all a new life.
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