Well, chalk up one more for the record books — Christmas 2025 is a wrap! Many will have sung O Little Town of Bethlehem, Silent Night, even Frosty the Snowman. Some of us made our biannual appearance at church (except for funerals, of course, or fewer and fewer weddings now and then).

Most of us have our trees disassembled with ornaments from the past tucked away in boxes until next year. Gifts have been hung in closets or tucked in drawers. Some may even intend to send thank you notes, digital to be sure! Others will return gifts not to their liking or to make sure it’s precisely the correct color or complimentary fit.

The whole spectacle and pageantry can get rather tedious year after year causing us to breathe an exhausted sigh of relief after “the Holidays”. Where is the meaning of our spirited greetings, the sentiment of frantically sent cards? Conjured memories are fleeting and we yearn for the elusive wonder and mystery of Christmases past. We settle for “Maybe next year!”

With growing certitude I’m finding when our rituals and stories do not find grounding in our current lives, in the very reality we experience here …now, all our efforts to conjure some fantastical past is sorely incapable of satisfying our hearts’ insistent hungers. Christmas’ redemptive word of hope for a suffering world — racked with conflict and fraught with greed and self-absorption — gets packed away with the artificial Christmas tree to be forgotten for another year.

But the Word still comes, takes flesh and finds expression! Take this, for example, from Pope Leo’s Christmas Day homily:

…brothers and sisters, since the Word was made flesh, humanity now speaks, crying out  with God’s own desire to encounter us. The Word has pitched his fragile tent among us. How, then,  can we not think of the tents in Gaza, exposed for weeks to rain, wind and cold; and of those of so  many other refugees and displaced persons on every continent; or of the makeshift shelters of  thousands of homeless people in our own cities? Fragile is the flesh of defenseless populations, tried  by so many wars, ongoing or concluded, leaving behind rubble and open wounds. Fragile are the  minds and lives of young people forced to take up arms, who on the front lines feel the senselessness  of what is asked of them and the falsehoods that fill the pompous speeches of those who send them  to their deaths. 

If not here? Now? When? Where?

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Pope Leo’s entire Christmas Day homily may be found at http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/homilies/2025/documents/20251225-messa-natale.html