Christmas With Our Eyes Wide Open
Every year, around mid-December, someone inevitably asks a version of the same question:
How can we celebrate Christmas when the world is on fire?
It’s a fair question. Wars rage. Children go hungry. Systems fail the vulnerable. Violence wears a thousand faces. Grief has taken up permanent residence in too many homes. And somehow - somehow - we are expected to string lights, bake cookies, hum familiar hymns, and call it joy.
For many, that tension feels unbearable. Celebrating feels frivolous. Decorating feels naïve. Singing feels dishonest. So we’re told we must choose: either face reality or embrace the season. Either be awake or be joyful.
But that’s a false choice.
Christmas was never meant to be celebrated with our eyes closed.
In fact, Christmas only makes sense when our eyes are wide open.
The story does not begin with peace and soft candlelight. It begins under occupation. It begins with fear. With a government threatened by the idea of a powerless king. With violence aimed at the most vulnerable. With a family forced to flee. With a baby born not into safety or certainty, but into instability and danger.
Jesus does not arrive after the world gets better.
He arrives because it hasn’t.
We’ve sentimentalized Christmas into something tidy and sanitized - shepherds with clean robes, quiet nights, gentle animals. But the original story is anything but gentle. It is political. It is disruptive. It is rooted in suffering and resistance and holy defiance.
Which means celebrating Christmas in troubling times isn’t a betrayal of the story.
It’s fidelity to it.
Celebrating Christmas with eyes wide open says: I see the pain. I see the injustice. I see the grief.
And still - I choose hope, not as denial, but as defiance.
This kind of celebration is not escapism. It is a protest.
Lighting candles in the dark is not pretending the dark doesn’t exist. It’s declaring that darkness does not get the final word.
Singing “peace on earth” while knowing how far we are from it is not hypocrisy. It is longing given voice. It is prayer made audible. It is a refusal to let cynicism hollow us out.
Christmas matters precisely because the world is broken.
If the world were whole, we wouldn’t need a savior born into poverty.
If justice reigned, we wouldn’t need angels announcing good news to the poor.
If peace were easy, it wouldn’t arrive first as a baby cradled by a tired mother in a borrowed space.
Celebrating Christmas with clarity means we do not look away - but we also do not surrender to despair. It means we allow joy to coexist with grief. It means we let beauty live alongside brutality without trying to explain it away.
This is not shallow joy.
This is hard-won hope.
It’s the kind of hope that keeps feeding people.
The kind that keeps welcoming strangers.
The kind that keeps loving children in a world that does not always protect them.
Eyes-wide-open Christmas people are not naïve. They are brave.
They know the cost of love. They know the weight of the world. And still, they choose to show up - with light, with generosity, with tenderness.
Because Christmas is not about pretending everything is okay.
It’s about believing, against all evidence to the contrary, that God still enters the mess.
That love still takes on flesh.
That the story is not finished.
So light the candles. Hang the lights. Sing the songs.
Not because things are fine.
But because they aren’t - and never have been.
And that’s exactly why Christmas came.