Christmas invites us to rediscover a childlike joy for the gift of life

(LifeSiteNews) — The best compliments in life I think are always uncertain. Praise sits uneasily with me, knowing myself far better than others do, and so I tend to try to wriggle out of it – like an embarrassing jumper presented as a gift.

My son told me the other day that I was just a big kid. He saw the face I made and corrected himself – “not that big, actually.” He is eight years old and already up to my chin.

I drew myself up to my full height of five feet four (six on my tippy toes) and demanded an explanation.

“You are fun. You play like a kid and do kid things. Kids like you…” he tailed off. “Kids like you and you are like them.”

I was delighted to hear this. I make no effort to resemble children, though God has gifted me with their dimensions. I wear old tweed jackets and the sort of shoes you imagine from a story by Charles Dickens. I even have a flat cap, like a Dickensian urchin would crunch in his freezing little hands as he peered, imploringly, through a frosted windowpane.

Sometimes I do this myself, usually through the window of my son’s Catholic school – in order to ward off any teacherly tellings-off which might be coming my way. It never works.

Yet my son has a point. I too prance about like a child at Christmas, because it is a time that is full of joy, and so I am, too. I do not expect presents of course, having grown up with tales of a sack of soot for children who appear on the wrong sort of list. As a result of my habit of having ideas and sharing them, I have tailored my expectations in life accordingly. Yet this does not diminish my delight. Even when things go wrong.

My children love to direct the Christmas decorations. Following their instructions, I found myself festooned with twenty feet of festive beading and no visible means of escape. Neither I nor my five-year-old daughter could decide where to put them, and so they ended up on me.

I could become the tree, we supposed out loud, but we agreed there would be no way I could stand still long enough to pull it off.

There was also the question of the fairy to consider. My daughter made a perplexed expression and put her little finger to her cheek. She was Having A Think. Then, she forgot all about me.

Her little face animated in the blinking lights, soon her tiny hands were about the nativity she placed on the windowsill. She named all the figures in a whisper, and placed the baby Jesus in the center with especial care.

I see my children as a way of seeing, too. With them in my life I glimpse theirs, how the world appears, and how the story of the most wonderful baby ever to have been born reflects into – and illuminates – the tale of their little lives.

There is wisdom in childhood, and it is as foolish to discard it as it is feckless to consider children sages for having it. What it reduces to is the wonder at the world and the capacity for joy. I do not forget myself in my oh-so serious thoughts, my stupid fretfulness and short temper. It is in these captious moments that I remember what a fool I can become, in an instant, when all the splendor and grace of life collapses into a frown. We captivate ourselves in a way that children do not do. Their bad moods are just that. Yet grown-ups invariably add reasons, and these histories can become our lives.

The childlike mind is free of this captivity. It has yet to learn the patterns of educated routine, which teach the enlightened to see beyond the obvious to something that is not there.

Of course, clever people do not believe in God – they only believe in the things they believe in place of the things we can all see. There is something of the child in the man or woman of God, who can behold in awe the majesty of creation, and the causeless power beyond words and imagining who moves it all.

It is silly to think that we should dress and behave as children in order to become wise. Yet the superstitions which corral the minds of modern men make them as cringe-inducing as the unfunniest of children’s entertainers.

Few children are so stupid as to trust the obviously deranged, who are presented to us as stunning and brave. It takes an educated modern mind to believe that everything sprang from nothing, for no reason at all, as if all life were the aftermath of a cosmic firework display. It is moderns who murmur about The Universe, to whose vast indifference they ascribe a godless benevolence. Others worship machines, believing these gimmicks will make them immortal.

There are old tales like Pygmalion (and Pinocchio after him) which tell us the moral of these stories. Today, the pinnacle of ethics is the pursuit of personal pleasure. You may remember that everyone who lingered long on Pleasure Island turned into an ass.

The games of adulthood conceal a danger which is absent from child’s play. Children know they are making belief when they make things up. We often forget this when we are telling stories to – or about – ourselves.

At Christmastime we feel more than ever the fierce jubilation of children, how season and ceremony combine in a celebration of life and its source of salvation.

“Was God a children?” asked my daughter the other day. “Yes,” I said. “He was.” And we looked at Him.

The example of Christ should of course be before us throughout our lives. It is the liturgical calendar which reminds us of the aspects of His life which may serve as the guiding light to our own. That God was a babe, a child – like them – fascinates children. That he played and sang and was tiny and delightful fills them with a meaning no other gift can supply.

I am happy to be called a child at Christmas, as at any other time. We are after all children before God, and to remember His gift of life to us all is to rejoice as if it were that magical morning when all the gifts in the world appear before us. Because they do, and they are, and it takes a child to remember that sometimes.