This Christmas, let’s go wild
One of the most memorable Christmas moments from my childhood doesn’t involve presents, but a pre-dawn toboggan run.
I was seven, and it was Epiphany, January 6, the last day of Christmas and the day that the three kings arrive and present gifts to the Baby Jesus. I had awoken before the rest of my family, and, in the pre-dawn darkness, headed out into the wintry chill with my Flexible Flyer sled. I crossed the road and headed to Caddy’s farm, where the steepest sledding hill in the county silently awaited.
The hill dropped sharply after a gentle slope, and I whizzed past the frozen pond and glided down a second incline toward an old-growth maple-oak forest, a darkened mystery of snow-silhouetted trees and wooded silence.
I’ve often wondered why this moment remains boldly in my memory. Why don’t I remember that special present I got, or didn’t get, that Christmas? Why is it that what lingers is the experience of something unusual that morning — a certain peace perhaps. Was it merely a moment of oasis within the holiday swirl? Or was it something else — one of those lovely Christmas “intangibles,” for instance, so celebrated in the 1947 celluloid classic, Miracle on 34th Street?
Many of us have vivid memories of the holidays — yet not all of our yuletide snapshots feature the presents we received, the candy we consumed, or the Santas we met, usually in malls.
Years later, while reading Henry David Thoreau, the famed 19th-century American philosopher and naturalist, I began to understand the significance of this Christmas memory.
In his 1862 essay “Walking,” published in The Atlantic Monthly, Thoreau noted that he would often walk, or “saunter,” up to four hours a day in the woods and fields around his home in Concord, Massachusetts. He avoided places where so-called human “improvements,” such as clear-cutting, had left the landscape “tame and cheap.”
“In wildness,” he asserted, “is the preservation of the world.”
Christmas and “the wild”? The two words seem worlds apart, at least in Thoreau’s sense of the term. With shopping, food preparation and gift-giving having become principal pastimes for many of us during the holidays, the thought of “wildness” in a Christmas celebration seems far-fetched, if not absurd.
Yet what are we to do with the memory of a solitary slide down a wintry hill, an event that was over in a few fleeting seconds, the image itself now but “a shadow of things that have been”?
The in-breaking of the divine into the world proclaimed by the Christmas story is not a quaint or cosy narrative.
It is, rather, an outlandish, unsettling and miraculous act of divine love. The Christmas story, after all, does have a touch of the untamed, but is there true wildness in it?
If you think about it, the “outdoors” plays a pretty significant role in the Nativity story. From the journey of the Holy Family from Nazareth to Bethlehem, to the shepherds in their fields, the Magi following a star in the east, to the stable itself (a quasi outdoor/ indoor site), the natural world forms a living, dynamic context for the birth of Jesus. The Christmas story unfolds amidst the wilds of these places and the encounters they shaped. Today, however, Christmas has largely moved indoors. Is it therefore at risk of becoming overly domesticated?
In addition, the outdoor dimension of Jesus’ birth is the setting for the miracle that occurs. The “King of kings” is not born in a royal nursery, but in the context of creation itself, replete with animals, angels and celestial bodies. In other words, the divine irruption into the world did not occur within a domesticated space, but in a wilder and less predictable arena.
Coming back to my Flexible Flyer, was there a deeper cosmological insight that my downhill run suggested?
Maybe the divine chooses the wild as its primary source of revelation. If so, is not the onus on us to preserve wild spaces and ensure future epiphanies?
Could it be that in wildness is the preservation of Christmas?