What opens your eye about Christmas?

I recently ran across an interesting factoid:

“The pupil of the eye expands as much as 45 percent when a person looks at something pleasing.”

If that’s true, what opens your eye about Christmas?

The late, great C.S. Lewis explored that topic when he wrote the following:

There is a stage in a child’s life at which it cannot separate the religious from the merely festal character of Christmas or Easter. I have been told of a very small and very devout boy who was heard murmuring to himself on Easter morning a poem of his own composition which began ‘Chocolate eggs and Jesus risen.’ This seems to me, for his age, both admirable poetry and admirable piety. But of course the time will soon come when such a child can no longer effortlessly and spontaneously enjoy that unity. He will become able to distinguish the spiritual from the ritual and festal aspect of Easter; chocolate eggs will no longer seem sacramental. And once he has distinguished he must put one or the other first. If he puts the spiritual first he can still taste something of Easter in the chocolate eggs; if he puts the eggs first they will soon be no more than any other sweetmeat. They will have taken on an independent, and therefore a soon withering, life.

When you look at Christmas, what is it that pleases you? Is it the festive nature and holiday delights? Or is it “Immanuel” – God with us?

Like devouring a chocolate egg on Easter, it can be easy to be captivated by, and carried away with, the trappings of the holiday. But if it’s “Immanuel” that expands our eye about Christmas, should this not then be a season of rich, profound, and profuse worship, praise, and adoration of Jesus Christ and a renewed plunging into communion with God?

Writing in the 1994 edition of, “The Minister’s Manual,” Robert E. Luccock would urge us to recover the real meaning of Christmas:

In New York’s Hayden Planetarium a special Christmas holiday show was enhanced by an added feature. A giant lollipop tree was projected onto the planetarium dome, surrounded by a horizon filled with brilliantly colored toys which came to life and cavorted to the tune of “Jingle Bells.” At the climax a huge figure of Santa Claus faded out in a snow storm, and the star of Bethlehem broke through into a sky that produced exactly the Palestine sky on the night of the nativity. The designer of this show may not realize that he dramatically staged the supreme Christmas message our world needs to understand: The recovery of the lost meaning of Christmas. This is not said in any criticism of Santa Claus; the effect must have delighted the hearts of all the children who saw it, without doing violence to their love of Bethlehem. But for adults it is a tragic loss to substitute “Jingle Bells” for “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” and a lollipop tree for the manger of Bethlehem. The instinct is right to fade out these things in the light of the Christmas star. It is about God’s incarnation that the angels sing — God with us.

E.B. White once wrote, “To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.” Do you see past the colorful wrappings of gifts, or is that what catches your eye? What is it that opens your eye about Christmas?

Scotty