I used this story in a Christmas meditation here at Glenn several years ago, inspiring some mischievous souls to have a lighted plastic baby Jesus outside the parsonage to greet Kathy and me after the 11 p.m. service. It’s a vision that still haunts my dreams.
If you visit my hometown of Ellijay during the holidays this year, you will find at the center of the town square a tall, beautifully adorned Christmas tree, and greenery and lights tastefully arranged will greet you all around town. It is really quite festive and inviting.
But it was not always so. When I was a kid, the decorations were, well, simpler. On the town square, next to the 12’ x 12’ aluminum and glass hut that served as the police station, stood a scraggly tree with a couple of dozen lights. Nearby was a plastic Santa and sleigh, complete with reindeer. The lead reindeer was Rudolph. I know that because Rudolph had a red light bulb duct-taped to his nose. It was a fairly large bulb as I recall and a fairly small nose.
Not far from the red glow of Rudolph’s nose stood the manger, rendered again in more-or-less weather-proof plastic. The stable was there and Mary and Joseph, and in the manger lay baby Jesus, who, like Rudolph, was electrified. There was a light bulb inside the plastic baby Jesus. And it blinked.
Looking at that scene as a teenager, I was absolutely convinced there was no place on earth as tacky as my hometown. And I might have been right. But, in fairness, there wasn’t a lot of money in the Ellijay of my youth. Some low-ranking city employees were told to decorate for Christmas, and, no, you can’t have any money. And so they did the best they could.
These days there seems to be quite a bit of money in Ellijay, some of it yours perhaps, and the town square is lovely, rather like an Atlanta mall, in fact. So why do I find myself missing Rudolph the Duct-Taped Reindeer and the blinking Jesus of my youth? There’s nostalgia in my wistfulness, to be sure, but I believe there was something beautiful in those make-shift decorations—something of the message of the season they awkwardly celebrated.
The heart of Christmas, you see, is not grandeur, but wonder; and the wonder of this season is Emmanuel—God with us. The one we call Lord, Savior, the Christ—the one who is God with us—was born not amidst the glories of wealth and power but of a young poor woman in a lonely stable somewhere off the square of an insignificant town not unlike the Ellijay of my memories.
A part of the wondrous good news of Christmas, then, is that there is no place so humble, no place so poor, no place so tacky even, that our Lord cannot fill it with the light of eternity. And that is the light that never blinks, even if the nativity scene does.
Rejoice!
Mark