Christmastime is here.

Families drawing near.

Oh that we could always see

Such spirit through the year.

That’s Vince Guaraldi’s song; you probably know it from the 1965 television special A Charlie Brown Christmas. Sung by a children’s choir that is ever-so-slightly out of tune, the song is a haunting blend of sweet nostalgia, gentle melancholy, and hope. Like the holiday itself.

So many Christmas songs and carols are tinged with the same hush, the same longing, even regret, that Guaraldi’s song captures. Is there a sadder-sounding song than “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”? And it could have been worse; the original opening line was, “Have yourself a merry little Christmas/It may be your last.” Huh?! Judy Garland refused to sing those words in the movie, Meet Me in St. Louis, and had them rewritten. The film was released in 1944, when so many families were separated by World War II, and the song reflects those hard times.

Christmas is protean. For nearly two thousand years, this commemoration of the birth of Jesus has touched and shaped history and culture, creed and communities, in so many ways. Christmas has become, down through the generations, a kind of sacred scaffolding—scripture, ritual, melody, candlelight—strong enough to bear almost any human weight. Joy, yes. The coming of the Christ child is, for believing Christians, the greatest joy in human history. But also grief, loneliness, regret, longing, memory. Especially memory.

Since Christmas returns every year to us, it becomes a kind of emotional palimpsest. The Ghost of Christmas Past is always with us this time of year, and he always has something to teach us. What happened once, long ago—the birth of a poor boy told and retold—seems to gather in its sacred space other births, other absences, other tables with an empty chair. That’s why Christmas can feel almost unbearably bright to some (especially the little ones) and so exquisitely tender to others. It can still somehow, for so many of us—even in this skeptical age—sanctify the full range of human experience.

This year, one aspect of the early days of Jesus and his family seems especially relevant: They were refugees, fleeing state violence and and seeking safety across borders:

“Behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up! Take the Child and His mother and flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you; for Herod is going to search for the Child to kill Him.”

“So Joseph got up and took the Child and His mother while it was still night, and left for Egypt.”

Earlier this year, I went to Chicago to see for myself up close the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in that city. (If you haven’t seen our Field Report from Chicago, you can watch it here.) Among the people I spoke with: Cardinal Blaise Cupich, the leader of the city’s 2 million Catholics. He spoke with simple clarity about the powerful resonance that the story of the Flight into Egypt has for us today:

And so to our poems—plural because Christmas carries so many meanings.

Wendy Cope is an English poet who has published a wonderful little book of Christmas poems. Cope is a deceptively “simple” poet; her commitment to rhyme and meter, and her wry way of looking at the world, are charming—but spiked with a strong woman’s frustrations about the world as it actually is, including Christmas:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedAt Christmas little children sing and merry bells jingle,

The cold winter air makes our hands and faces tingle

And happy families go to church and cheerily they mingle

And the whole business is unbelievably dreadful, if you're single.

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Sir John Betjeman was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1972 to his death in 1984. A committed traditionalist and a committed cultural conservative, Betjeman’s work was suffused with nostalgia for a Britain that was practically obliterated by two world wars. But there is nothing gloomy about Betjeman. There’s a bounce in the step of his lines, and a warmth to his memories of Christmases gone by. A devout Anglican, he mixed in this famous Christmas poem both the quotidian and the divine dimensions of the holiday.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe bells of waiting Advent ring,The Tortoise stove is lit againAnd lamp-oil light across the nightHas caught the streaks of winter rainIn many a stained-glass window sheenFrom Crimson Lake to Hookers Green.

The holly in the windy hedgeAnd round the Manor House the yewWill soon be stripped to deck the ledge,The altar, font and arch and pew,So that the villagers can say'The church looks nice' on Christmas Day.

Provincial Public Houses blaze,Corporation tramcars clang,On lighted tenements I gaze,Where paper decorations hang,And bunting in the red Town HallSays 'Merry Christmas to you all'.

And London shops on Christmas EveAre strung with silver bells and flowersAs hurrying clerks the City leaveTo pigeon-haunted classic towers,And marbled clouds go scudding byThe many-steepled London sky.

And girls in slacks remember Dad,And oafish louts remember Mum,And sleepless children's hearts are glad.And Christmas-morning bells say 'Come!'Even to shining ones who dwellSafe in the Dorchester Hotel.

And is it true? And is it true,This most tremendous tale of all,Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,A Baby in an ox's stall ?The Maker of the stars and seaBecome a Child on earth for me ?

And is it true ? For if it is,No loving fingers tying stringsAround those tissued fripperies,The sweet and silly Christmas things,Bath salts and inexpensive scentAnd hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,No carolling in frosty air,Nor all the steeple-shaking bellsCan with this single Truth compare -That God was man in PalestineAnd lives today in Bread and Wine.

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Finally, T.S. Eliot. As you might expect, this one is not a pretty little ditty. Eliot goes deep. For him, Christmas is a profound spiritual disturbance in the sweep of human history. Something happens with the birth of that poor boy. The world is irreversibly changed, and it is not clear to those who confront the incandescent moment in the manger what happens next. When he wrote this poem, Eliot had just converted to Anglicanism. Here, he speaks in the voice of one of the Three Wise Men or Three Kings, a man who travelled far to discover that Christmas is not comforting, but arduous.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published‘A cold coming we had of it,Just the worst time of the yearFor a journey, and such a long journey:The ways deep and the weather sharp,The very dead of winter.’And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,Lying down in the melting snow.There were times we regrettedThe summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,And the silken girls bringing sherbet.Then the camel men cursing and grumblingAnd running away, and wanting their liquor and women,And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendlyAnd the villages dirty and charging high prices:A hard time we had of it.At the end we preferred to travel all night,Sleeping in snatches,With the voices singing in our ears, sayingThat this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,And three trees on the low sky,And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,But there was no information, and so we continuedAnd arrived at evening, not a moment too soonFinding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,And I would do it again, but set downThis set downThis: were we led all that way forBirth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,But had thought they were different; this Birth wasHard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,With an alien people clutching their gods.I should be glad of another death.

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Merry Christmas to all of you who are celebrating! And may your holidays—of whatever faith tradition, or whatever feelings the end of the year brings to your home—be merry, bright, peaceful, and loving!

—Terry