Christmas, when I was a kid, was a beautiful, magical time of year. All of my memories are filled with Bing Crosby singing and hot chocolate with tiny marshmallows. I was always so excited. I never realized that eight out of eleven Christmases growing up, my family was alone.  
My parents, always hard for money, would save all year if they had to for presents, and on Christmas day, Santa Claus would always have brought that toy I’d been longing for. I never wrote Santa letters. He always knew. I left him cookies, and milk and so much bright eyed faith.
My brother told me about Santa when I was 5 or 6. It was just after Christmas and I was happy the jolly old elf had brought me my first radio. We were en route to Tennessee and my heart was broken when my parents did not deny my brother’s claim.
We still put out cookies the next year.

What is it really, about Christmas?
I learned about Santa Claus earlier than most of my friends. I soon learned that Jesus was probably born in September. I read up on the Winter Solstice, and how the mediaeval church assimilated pagan traditions from Northern Europe. I learned the origin of the Santa Claus tradition, who is more based on Odin than on the actual Saint Nicolas. I even looked up why we put up Christmas trees.
As I’ve gotten older, and have lived in Southern California, Christmas has become more and more sad for me. I want so desperately to feel the joy I felt when I was small, pressing my nose against a frosted window, watching flurries fill the air, proud of all the presents I handpicked from the local Dollar Tree with so much love and attempted frugality.
Now, I find myself crying a lot more than laughing during the most wonderful time of year. I know a lot of people experience depression at the holidays, and I’m crushed to learn I’m one of them. It is not as though Christmas is bad in theory. Quite the opposite. I haul out the Christmas cds before Thanksgiving. I’ve been put in charge of ornaments. I request drives to our local "Candy Cane Lane" for the spectacular light displays.
But in all of my desperation for that joy, I find myself only longing for what Christmas used to be to me.  Now so much reality gets in the way of magic. One day cannot change a world where people- people we know- normal seeming folks, can feel so empty as to take a gun to their head.
Where is the magic in that sort of world?
And what is the point?

During my first semester in college, I took a course on the Old Testament. While reading, it is easy to lose hope right along with the Israelites. Where is this God in a world where we can be enslaved by our enemies? Yet, even though they disobeyed God’s statutes with regularity, every time the Israelites cried out to Yahweh, He would send them a savior. There were kinsmen redeemers, then judges. The people continued sinning, needing salvation, and being saved. They cried to God again, for a king, and one was given. And then they continued sinning. They continued failing. They were finally driven into exile, far from their homelands. When they returned, their city was in shambles, their temple destroyed.
Where was God?
There is a vast period of silence after their return. The cycle of sin and need for redemption continued for several centuries.
So where was God?

And finally He answered in the loudest possible terms- the cry of a baby. A baby who would grow to save the world, once and for all, taking not just the Hebrew’s sins upon himself, but all of the world’s, breaking the cycle forever.

And so maybe that is the truth; that sometimes it really does just take a day to change the world. I am not saying that I am going to wake up on Christmas day, and be freed from the sorrows of life, or that the weight of this year; this painful series of days and ceaseless ages leading up to a single December 25th, are going to disappear.
However, I am saying that the hope of Christmas, the hope and in fact certainty, that there will be family, and love and joy, is enough to ease the sorrows just for long enough for the world to shift in my eyes- just long enough to make a difference.

So, where is the magic?
Where is God?
Where is hope?

Here, sitting on the counter with the cookies.  I made them for Santa Claus.