My twelve-year-old daughter Rory came home from school last week with an assignment. She’s in sixth grade at a lovely Catholic school, and her religion class—via the Knights of Columbus1—requires her to make a “Keep Christ in Christmas” poster. For a grade.
We sat at the kitchen table looking at the assignment sheet together, and I found myself wondering: what would it actually mean to keep Christ in Christmas?
I think I know what they’re expecting, though I don’t want to make any firm conclusions. I grew up on a maximum-strength dose of Fox News with Rush Limbaugh on the side. I know this narrative intimately. I lived in it, breathed it, had it playing in the background of my childhood and adolescence like a soundtrack of perpetual outrage.
I have a hankering that they’re expecting something defensive. Jesus in a manger with “The Reason for the Season” emblazoned across the top. Maybe a nativity scene being protected from evil secular forces with Christian warriors wielding shields. Something that plays into the culture war version that’s been playing every December for as long as I can remember. You know the drill: the annual ritual of hunting down Christmas heretics. The retail worker who says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” The coffee chain with red cups that aren’t ‘Christian enough’ (whatever that means). The city hall that puts up a “Season’s Greetings” banner instead of a nativity scene.
I know this story so well because I saw what it did to people. My late father—who I could count on one hand the times I saw him in a church—loved nothing more than getting fired up about people offending Christendom. Every December, he’d work himself into a rage. The anger was real. The sense of being under siege was palpable. And it had almost nothing to do with what Jesus came to reveal and everything to do with tribal identity and cultural territory.
That’s what makes me recoil now. Not the caring about Christmas—I get that. But the anger. The rage. The way defending Christmas became an excuse to nurse resentment and practice exclusion. The way people who never darkened a church door eleven months of the year suddenly became ferocious guardians of Christianity’s cultural real estate every December.
So sitting there with Rory, looking at this assignment, I kept thinking: what if keeping Christ in Christmas means something entirely different? What if the people most anxious about defending Christmas are actually the ones missing it?
The Irony of the Pitchfork Brigade
Look, I get it. I’m open to believing that their anxiety might come from genuine care. These folks really do love Christmas. They’re afraid of losing something precious, something beautiful, something that shaped their childhoods and gives meaning to their Decembers. I don’t want to be dismissive of that.
But somewhere along the way, that care curdled into fear. Into control. Into territorial defensiveness. Into pitchforks and torches and heretic hunts.
And in my best depiction, this is the theological opposite of what the Incarnation actually means.
If Christ is really in Christmas—if we actually grasp what it means that the Word became flesh—we’d be liberated from all that anxious policing. We wouldn’t need to monitor the greeting cards or wage culture war over coffee cups or keep score of who’s celebrating correctly. The Incarnation isn’t fragile. It doesn’t need our defensive posturing to protect it. God isn’t so small that he can be threatened by a Starbucks marketing decision.
The irony is almost too perfect: the people shaking their fists and pulling out pitchforks to hunt down everyone who doesn’t slap a Jesus bow on everything might actually be the strongest counterforce to Christmas there is. Their bitterness, their need to control and condemn, their furious scorekeeping is far more corrosive to the spirit of Christmas than someone wishing you “Happy Holidays.”
But here’s what I want to be careful about: they’re not the villains in this story. They’re the ones suffering. They’re trapped under the weight of their own judgment, locked out of their own party by their own gatekeeping. Their bitterness is keeping them away from the very gift they claim to be defending.
They’re Scrooge before the ghosts arrive.
What We’ve Lost
Robert Farrar Capon—who’s been my theological north star for years now—would have a field day with the “Keep Christ in Christmas” crowd. He’d probably start by asking what Christ we’re talking about. Because the Jesus they’re defending often looks suspiciously like Santa Claus in religious drag: a cosmic accountant checking his list, making sure everyone’s been sufficiently good, rewarding proper behavior and punishing insufficient Christmas spirit.
That’s not the Incarnation. That’s works-righteousness with tinsel.
The real scandal of Christmas—the thing Capon never tired of proclaiming—is that God crashes into a world that can’t earn anything, can’t deserve anything, can’t qualify for anything. He comes as a helpless infant who will grow up to die for failures and enemies. There’s no naughty-nice list. There’s no moral calculation. There’s just this mad plunge into matter, into mess, into a world that has no idea what to do with him.
Culture warriors have reduced the most radical claim in human history—that God became matter—to kitsch and tribal signaling. They’ve taken the wildness of the Incarnation and domesticated it into a culture war talking point.
But we have to remember that God didn’t just visit creation like some cosmic tourist. He became it. Took it on. Participated in it at the most intimate level possible. The Incarnation means God is saying yes to the whole bloody beautiful material world—not as an observer, not as a judge, but as a lover who dives in completely.
And here’s what kills me: the people most anxious about “keeping Christ in Christmas” often operate from a scarcity mindset, this zero-sum “we’re losing our holiday!” panic. As if the Incarnation were something that could be taken away by secularists. As if God’s invasion of reality were somehow reversible. As if saying “Happy Holidays” could undo what happened in Bethlehem.
The Incarnation isn’t fragile cultural property that needs defending. It’s an ontological fact about the nature of reality itself.
The real threat to Christmas isn’t secularism. It’s the way we’ve turned grace into a transaction. It’s the way we’ve made Christmas about deserving—deserving the gifts, deserving the joy, deserving to be included in God’s favor. It’s the way we’ve buried the scandal of unconditional love under mountains of conditional religious performance.
What It Actually Looks Like
So what does keeping Christ in Christmas actually look like?
For me, the answer comes from Dickens. Specifically, from my favorite Dickens character (who is SO underrated, imho): Fezziwig.
You remember Fezziwig—old Scrooge’s former employer, the one the Ghost of Christmas Past shows him. Fezziwig throws a party for his employees that costs him, as Scrooge calculates, “a few pounds.” Just a few pounds. But it creates joy worth infinitely more.
And here’s what gets me about Fezziwig: he doesn’t say a single pious word. There are no Jesus-and-Mary decorations. No one’s checking to make sure everyone says “Merry Christmas” instead of some other greeting. He’s not defending anything or policing anything or proving anything.
He just throws open his doors and his heart. Pure, scandalous, unreasonable generosity and bountiful hospitality.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And it’s enough to haunt Scrooge decades later, to show him what he’s lost, to break through his defenses and make him weep for what’s been missing from his life.
Fezziwig doesn’t need to make Christmas Christian. He just lives the scandalous grace of it.
Or think about Tiny Tim... That absurd, defiant “God bless us, every one!” coming from a child who has every reason to be bitter. He’s not earning blessing. He’s not distributing blessing according to merit. In his simple proclamation, I’m reminded that blessing is the nature of reality, the ground of all being, the way things actually are beneath all our calculations and scorekeeping.
And then, to follow the Dickinsonian rabbit hole further down, there’s the resurrected Scrooge, who becomes almost embarrassingly generous. He doesn’t know how to calibrate it properly anymore. He’s buying turkeys that are too big, paying Bob Cratchit too much, laughing too loud in the streets. It’s undignified. It’s excessive. It’s over the top.
It’s grace.
He can’t wait to give and give and invite and receive and praise. He’s become contagious with joy. And notice: his joy doesn’t require anyone else to understand it or participate in it or acknowledge it properly. He’s just overflowing. He doesn’t even know what day of the month it is and he doesn’t care.
The culture warriors want a Christmas that’s respectable. That maintains proper boundaries. That knows who deserves to be included and who doesn’t. That requires the right words and the right decorations and the right acknowledgment.
But that’s the opposite of the Incarnation. God didn’t come reasonably. God didn’t come respectably. God came as a scandal—to the wrong people, in the wrong circumstances, in the wrong way—without asking anyone’s permission or following anyone’s protocol.
God came like Fezziwig throwing a party.
The Baby Who Receives
Here’s the evangelistic paradox: the pitchfork approach actually repels people from the very thing it claims to defend.
Who wants to join that Christmas? Who’s attracted to angry gatekeeping and bitter scorekeeping and culture war grievance? Who encounters the “Keep Christ in Christmas” brigade and thinks, “Ah yes, this is what I’ve been missing in my life—this anxious defensiveness, this tribal resentment, this need to police everyone’s holiday greetings”?
But resurrected Scrooge? He’s irresistible.
People don’t even understand what’s happened to him, but they can’t help being caught up in it. His joy doesn’t require their comprehension or their participation to be real. He’s just overflowing, and the overflow is contagious.
If the fundamentalists understood the profound counter-cultural richness of Christmas—if they grasped what keeping Christ in Christmas actually means—they might discover something beautiful: the gift of the Incarnation is a baby in a manger who gives his gifts to us by letting us tend to him.
Yes, in the newborn Jesus, God gives by letting us tend.
The Incarnation means God makes himself vulnerable. Dependent. Receivable. He doesn’t come as the harsh judge demanding proper acknowledgment and correct theological formulae. He comes as an infant who needs to be held and fed and kept warm. Who needs Mary and Joseph. Who needs the shepherds and the magi. Who needs human hands and human care.
The gift is in the tending. In the relationship. In the intimacy. In the radical vulnerability of God making himself small enough to hold.
That’s what’s truly counter-cultural about Christianity. Not its moral strictness or its boundary-policing or its culture war grievances. But its vision of God as self-emptying love. God as the one who gives by receiving. God as the one who saves by being saved. God as the one who becomes so small and so vulnerable that we can actually participate in taking care of him.
That’s genuinely weird. That’s genuinely wonderful. That’s genuinely world-upending.
That might actually intrigue your secular neighbors.
And here’s the thing: what I want to offer them as a Christian isn’t a demand that they say “Merry Christmas” or put up nativity scenes or perform some kind of cultural Christianity. I want to invite them into freedom from the insanity and sterility of hyper-consumeristic Christmas: the busyness, the faux joy, the exhausting obligation of it all. The Incarnation liberates us from that. It says the material world matters because God became matter, which means we can enjoy gifts and feasting without being enslaved to them. We can rest in abundance that’s already given rather than scrambling to manufacture it through frantic spending and doing.
That’s the gift. That’s what might actually be good news to people drowning in December’s demands.
But the Christmas patrol? They make Christianity look like every other anxious tribal identity fighting for territory. Just another interest group with a grievance. Just another faction that’s bitter about losing cultural power.
Scrooge’s resurrection joy, on the other hand, doesn’t argue. It doesn’t defend. It doesn’t need to win. It just keeps giving and inviting and receiving until the giving and inviting and receiving become their own argument.
That’s infectious. And it’s infectious precisely because it doesn’t depend on others getting the joke or saying the right words or acknowledging the right things. It just cares about sharing. About inviting. About the sheer joy of participating in reality as God has made it—shot through with grace, soaked in generosity, founded on the bedrock of love that won’t let us go.
The Poster
So what will Rory put on her poster?
I don’t know if she’ll ask my advice, but here’s what I’ve been batting around... Maybe Fezziwig’s party with the caption: “Keep Christ in Christmas: Throw a Better Party.” Or the manger scene with an absurdly diverse crowd of visitors: “Keep Christ in Christmas: He Never Checked the Guest List.”
I don’t know what we’ll land on. But I know this: the real invitation isn’t to police the greetings more vigilantly. It’s not to wage culture war more effectively.
The real invitation is simpler and more radical: Put down the pitchfork. Come to Fezziwig’s party.
The turkey is absurdly large. The wine is flowing. There’s no admission price, no guest list, no one checking to see if you said the right greeting or have the right credentials or belong to the right tribe.
The bitterness is its own punishment. The joy is waiting.
That’s how you keep Christ in Christmas. Not by defending the feast, but by joining it. Not by demanding proper acknowledgment from others, but by becoming so ridiculously, embarrassingly, undignifiedly generous that people can’t help but wonder what happened to you.
Not by making Christmas safe and respectable and ‘properly Christian.’
But by letting the Incarnation wreck you. By letting grace make you foolish. By letting love make you excessive.
By becoming the kind of person who doesn’t even know what day of the month it is, and doesn’t care, because it’s Christmas (soon—but we’re not even in Advent yet!), and Christmas means God crashed into our world as a baby who needs us to tend him.
That’s the scandal. That’s the gift. That’s what we’re invited into.
The party’s already started. The doors are already open. Come on in.
To be clear: the Knights do wonderful work in the world, and I’m genuinely grateful that my daughter attends a school where she gets assignments like this instead of... well, a lot of other things kids are being asked to do in schools these days. Even though my stomach turns over a bit at the culture war connotations of “Keep Christ in Christmas,” I’m oddly refreshed that this is the kind of wholesome project she’s being asked to think about.
I would love to have the power to print this everywhere and let others live the experiences of your insight … perfect is your message … upending is the beautiful devastation of it all! Thank You! Can I vote to have you in line for Pope?
Ooh! I like, "He's never checked the guest list!"
One of my favorite ways to remember Christmas came from a BC comic from the late 1970s or early 1980s (I haven't been able to find it since,) which stayed on my mom's refrigerator for decades. Two characters are looking from afar at the star shining over the nativity. But the shadow cast by the star is the cross. There are no words.