Believe in the Magic of Christmas

In an odd twist of fate my grocery delivery mixed up my wife's Christmas card order. What to my wondering eyes should appear, but an overly sappy Santa commanding us all to "believe in the magic of Christmas." At first I nearly chucked them. But then I looked closely at Santa, and it occurred to me that the whole card was in jest. Should we not take this command as a kind of joke?  

You may wonder whether this is just another bit of bah-humbuggery here. Don't get me wrong, I have on occasion secretly longed to shimmy into a tightly tailored Santa suit in order to steal the consumer core from Christmas. Isn't this the moral of Dr. Seuss's the Grinch? Only by stripping away the stuff of Christmas can we ever be merry. In many ways this is the quiet justification of all Scroogish tails which we tell at this time of year. But I don't think this is really what my "believe in the magic" Christmas cards are saying. 

Isn't the best way to say Merry Christmas today to take the sappy consumer infatuation with some ephemeral state of bliss to its absurd limits? Isn't it precisely as we accept the total stupidity of Christmas as it mistakenly arrives on our doorsteps each year that it might mean something completely else? Maybe in the joke there is freedom to laugh precisely in the command to believe. On the one hand we accept that the stuff of Christmas makes belief impossible. On the other, that only in the acceptance of the impossibility of belief (implied by the command) do we come close to what Christmas might be about. Or as Luther puts it, “If they should poke their heads into heaven… they would find no one but Christ laid in the crib… and so would fall down again and break their necks.” Of course, this also leaves open the atheist possibility that it is all just a bit of magic, in which case the theologian and atheist alike can laugh at the joke, whichever way they choose to take it.