macy's and other retailers have long sold a line of potpourri, sprays, and candles called "the smell of Christmas." if you've never experienced "the smell of Christmas," you've missed out on a fabulous thing.
if you've never experienced the smell of the first Christmas, you're missing out on even more.
the first Christmas did not smell like cinnamon. it smelled like dung.
the first Christmas did not smell like cinnamon because the first Christmas did not take place in a kitchen with a double oven, an island, stainless steel appliances, and a tile backsplash imported from italy.
the first Christmas took place in a bathroom. an outdoor bathroom for beasts. the worst kind of bathroom, quite frankly. there may have been a star overhead, but there were no cute hand towels hanging on the towel bar with cute little embroidered stars on 'em.
if there was a midwife, we don't know about her. so......picture that. a bathroom for beasts and a mother giving birth in the dirt. somebody cut the cord. picture that.
no. the first Christmas surely didn't smell like "the smell of Christmas." and yet........it could have. why didn't it?
why didn't God choose to be born in a palace? or, at least, in a hospital?
if what passed as a "hospital" over 2,000 years ago was still too fancy for God, then why not the inn? why wasn't there any room there? there could have been. God could have willed it so. why didn't He?
i think that of all the modern aspects that we have managed to pile on over the years onto the celebration of Christmas and of all the deviations in our brains from what really happened, how it must have smelled is the one thing above all that we are divorced from. we trick ourselves into thinking that the stable had clean, warm hay and that the animals had politely done their business somewhere out in the field. and that none of them were kicking up too much dirt or making too much noise. they were just standing there with big, brown eyes, looking on, in adoration.
we completely ignore the reality of what that scene must have really looked like, felt like, and smelled like. we put out little nativity scenes on our bookshelves and run straight for the egg nog.
but i think it's probably important to stop and think about how gross the whole thing must have been. and to think about how it didn't have to be that way. but it was.
and to think that only a few people in the whole history of the world (myself definitely not one of them but mother teresa and pope francis for sure)seem really to have grasped what the message of all that indignity is.....
that we are to stoop down. we are to lower ourselves, just as Christ lowered Himself. that writing a check to charity isn't enough. writing a check to charity is like giving birth in the hospital, not in the poop.
that we are to get rid of our stuff and give it to someone who doesn't have any hay. clean or otherwise.
that if God did it, he wants us to do it. how. much. clearer. could. He. have. been?
as much as i love "the smell of Christmas," i need the smell of Christmas more.
so do you.
