It is important, not incidental, to remember that, like Advent, Christmas is a season. Still preserved in monastic communities and in the anomalous local church, the awareness of and participation in the twelve days of Christmas that are laid out like stepping stones between Christmas day and Epiphany have largely been lost. To be unaware of these days is to risk losing their suggestive insights and to dodge their personal and communal implications.

For people who take the base word “Christ” as the core feature of our identity, Christmas no less than Advent bears truths in which we are invited and charged to participate. To this end, the local church would do well to offer creative, enriching opportunities to help us remember that Christmas is a season not just a day. And not just a season but the incarnation of the essential and defining mystery of our faith: God is with us. And not only the mystery of our faith but our life work as each and every Christian is called to transpose the mystery of Emmanuel into his or her life in conscious, intentional, and tangible ways.

Perhaps the most noticeable, surprising, and revelatory insight about the twelve days of Christmas as set down in the liturgical calendar of the Western Church is symbolized in two days that fall immediately after Christmas, namely, the Feast of St. Stephen (December 26) and the Feast of Holy Innocents (December 28). The fact that the first commemorates the stoning of St. Stephen, considered the first Christian martyr, and the second memorializes the slaughter of the innocent children by Herod in an effort to destroy his alleged competition, should ensure that our lasting image of Christmas is not Isabella Ruiz’s pious portrayal of Mary of Nazareth and Johnny Robinson’s humorous cameo as a bathrobed shepherd at the 4 pm Christmas Eve service.

I have lived sixty-one years and as best as I can remember, no December 26^th that followed the in-breaking light of Christ celebrated on Christmas day was ever devoid of headlines and heartaches that revealed the presence and traces of self-aggrandizement, greed, abuse of power, prejudice, injustice, violence, and the malignant -isms that cast a destructive shadow on people’s lives and darken the world. No Christmas in my lifetime, however reverently and fully celebrated, made the headlines on December 26^th markedly different than the headlines on December 24^th. Does that mean Christmas is a hoax, a sham, an embarrassment, as fake as the plastic Christmas tree in the downtown storefront window? Does it mean the “goodness and light” of “the child, sleeping in the night” of whom we sang at Midnight Mass is actually rather anemic and dim? Or does it mean like Mary, we’ve got our work to do as participants in God’s labor of love?

Our Buddhist brothers and sisters say “After ecstasy, laundry.” The Christian mantra is “After Christmas, the work of Christmas.” Or “After the Incarnation, GO! get incarnating.” That is, after celebrating the incarnation of Divine Love and solidarity in Jesus through the assent of Mary, what remains is the incarnation of Divine Love in and through us. This is the fork in the road where faith as belief and faith as a way of being and acting in the world for the sake of love part ways. To the query, “After Christmas, then what?” Howard Thurman reminds us of the fitting reply, “The work of Christmas” which are the works of mercy and justice. To think the correct response is simply “Salvation,” and that we can go to sleep another night with visions of sugar plums dancing in our heads while families in Aleppo pray bombs won’t find them in their sleep, is to make a mockery of Christmas, to diminish it to “cheap grace” for the fortunate few, and to miss the divine summons that comes with the divine gratuity of divine solidarity.

It is sad indeed, sobering, illuminating, and challenging to realize that the world-situation into which Jesus was born still resembles so many of the more ignominious features of our world today: the play for power; the social structure that divides the world into the haves and the have-nots, elites and subjects; militarized territories enforcing a false peace; the insecurity and adolescent egos of rulers and their rule by intimidation or violence; the often hidden but daily presence of oppression and exploitation; poverty, homelessness, and hunger in a world of mansions and plenty; and the difficult plight of those whom the dominant culture either neglects, marginalizes, denigrates, or demonizes.

We go to sleep on Christmas night to the reality that though “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (Jn 1:5), that darkness still exists when we wake up on December 26^th. Awakening to this reality requires courage, spiritual audacity, a stable full of radical hope to believe Love is the greatest power in the world. It requires the compassion to risk relinquishing and reaching out beyond our own private, cherished security. It means the incarnation is not merely a doctrine or a once-a-year holiday but a view of the world from a divine perspective. It means incarnation and the salvation it embodies is a vocation, a task, and a responsibility.

For people who self-identify as Christ-ones, putting Christ back into Christmas involves transposing the incarnation. To wait patiently and to yearn fiercely for the light of Christ during Advent and to sing “Joy to the world the Lord is come” at Christmas time until we do it again a year later is not enough. When we reduce the incarnation to an external act of God that saves us, salvation quickly becomes little more than a “thing” given like a giant cardboard Lottery check and all we are asked to do is to show up, receive it, and smile for the cameras. Instead, the incarnation that expresses and embodies salvation is a happening, the in-breaking movement of Divine Love that, despite evidence to the contrary, is the original vision, hidden ground, enlivening dynamism, and eternal truth of the cosmos and all that is within it.

To wait and yearn for the light of Christ during Advent involves more than hearing about what people in Jesus’ day yearned and waited for. In case we missed the divine memo, to celebrate Advent and Christmas implicates us. We are implicated by both our faith and our humanity, by our allegiance to Christ and our responsibility to others. We are implicated still in the work of Advent to make straight the way of the Prince of Peace by making peace, by being just, by practicing loving kindness, and radical hospitality. We are implicated in the work of Christmas to recognize, guard, and promote the conditions and relationships in which dignity, well-being, and the possibility of flourishing become a reality for all. By celebrating Christmas, we are called daily not just to sing of the light of Christ but to bring the light of Christ into “the dark cold and empty desolation” of people’s lives, to be the house of hope and the cradle of compassion.

The light of Christ we receive is the light we are to enact as our daily practice in season and out of season. To take the name of Christ, to consider oneself a Christ-one, is to give our assent, as did Mary, to be bearers and birthers of the light in a world that is still broken, violent, dark, and difficult for many to live in. The reign of God, the Divine dream Jesus embodies and which we are called to help make manifest “on earth as it is in heaven” is characterized by justice, righteousness, mercy, and peace. The work of Christmas, the incarnation of love, is comprised of any and every thought, word, or deed that clears a path and makes a home for these modes of action and qualities of right relationships. Let us get to work. God needs our help.