May Your Days Be Merry!

“May your days be merry.” Those are the words I wound up putting on this year’s holiday card.

No family stories. No news-filled doggerel thrown together in the run-up to Christmas.

Just, “May your days be merry.”

It’s a line lifted from the 1940s Irving Berlin song, “(I’m Dreaming of a) White Christmas.”

“White Christmas” — you hear it everywhere. At the mall. At the dentist’s office. At the car wash. With an estimated 100 million copies sold, “White Christmas” is thought to be the most popular pop tune ever recorded.

A Sentimental Song

I like “White Christmas” okay. It’s a sentimental, safely secular song. I’ll sing along if that’s what everybody else in the room is doing.

But for me the dream that “White Christmas” dreams is as wishy-washy as it is white. It tries hard to be oblivious to the (baby) elephant in the room — the newborn Jesus.

“White Christmas” misses the point of Christmas, which is the radical fact of God’s presence in the world. Christmas is Christianity’s celebration of God’s willingness to enter time and space and throw a little comfort our way.

When Jon and I put together our Christmas cards we made sure they weren’t too Christmassy. We have Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists and God-knows-whats among our friends. So, though our cards might mention Christmas, they never mention Jesus or Wise Men or an outsized star hanging in the sky.

Just, “May Your Days Be Merry”

This year I am sticking to our old tradition. There’s no Baby Jesus on my 2022 Christmas card (though there might be one on the postage stamp). No hallelujahs. No angels with wings and trumpets. Just, “May your days be merry.”

But! Just so you know, when I chose that phrase, “May your days be merry,” I intended it to be code for — may your days be filled with joy, hope and wonder.

Joy and hope that we are not forgotten. That we are loved. That God is right here among us, and by “us” I mean everybody — Christians, Jews and the God-knows-whats. Everybody. As always.

And so, today, I say to you, along with the recipients of my 2022 holiday card (which will hit the post office on the late side again this year): May your days be merry!

This is my second Christmas without Jon. Read about how I managed the first one at “Widowed. Or, How to Wrestle a Christmas Tree Into Its Stand Without Calling the Neighbors for Help.”