December can exhaust a pastor. For years I have told people that Christmastime is busier than Holy Week, not because of the raw number of services but due to the parties, activities, and responsibilities like purchasing gifts and putting up decorations that accumulate like a heavy snowfall between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Preaching for extra services in Advent and Christmas gets crammed into a calendar that is already overstuffed. For me, there have been more than a few years when this bred resentment—resentment against the busyness that attends Christmas.

Joshua Gibbs writes his book, The 25th, to address this issue. He writes for grinches, not scrooges: a scrooge being a miser, but a grinch a cynic. The grinch is someone who once loved Christmas but now finds it a disappointment and resents the season. In this work, Gibbs tasks himself with reigniting a childlike love for Christmas as the proper time to joyously celebrate the birth of Christ, which he accomplishes through a mixture of slapstick and seriousness that is always deeply in earnest and entertaining at the same time.

Gibbs is representative of the trend of men who grew up in shallow Evangelicalism moving towards churches with more theological rigor, depth, and sacramental practice. In his case, this meant that he became Orthodox. His newfound appreciation for liturgy, church year, and mystery informs, in part, his attempt to reclaim Christmas. He is also reacting to the excesses and oddities of his childhood in Evangelicalism, some of which will resonate for readers who grew up in Wisconsin Synod congregations.

For example, Gibbs pushes back very strongly against the theory that the Christian Church co-opted a Roman festival of the solstice when it established December 25 as the date of Jesus’ birth, dedicating a chapter titled, “What if Christmas is exactly what it purports to be?” to unpack his reasons for believing that Christ actually was born on December 25. He argues that, when Protestants say, “Jesus wasn’t actually born on Christmas Day,” they are staking out theological territory in addition to making an historical claim: if Jesus actually was born on December 25, it would vindicate tradition over against sola Scriptura, and therefore Protestants want Jesus to be born on any date other than December 25. His point is worth considering, even if Lutherans would not have so much of an issue in accepting traditions like this and others (e.g., that Peter eventually wound up in Rome) without viewing them as a threat to Scripture as the sole source, norm, and authority in the church.

Gibbs argues for the date of December 25 on the basis of the timeline: Christians fixed the date of Christmas earlier than they celebrated it (130) and before the emperor Aurelian set apart December 25 as the feast of Sol Invictus in AD 274, who, in his view, did so as an attempt to “subvert well-established Christian claims” (122). Gibbs is not at his strongest in his historical analysis, and a reader might not be fully convinced by his argument. However, at the very least he does raise a point that is well worth taking to heart: there is little to be gained by making historical claims one can’t substantiate about the date of Jesus’ birth. Stick to the text! Those who are called to preach the joy of the nativity will do better if they avoid feeling the need to also do some debunking about dates.

Another example of Gibbs reacting to his childhood appears in his defense of Santa Claus. Gibbs pinpoints his parents’ strong anti-Santa stance as part of the larger suspicion of magic and the “satanic panic” of the 1980s (17). His own approach is much more glib: Santa is a myth, of course, and not a particularly good one, but also not one that needs to be pilloried. Santa is not so much a lie told by parents as the same kind of imaginative play that parents consistently engage in with their children (25), and, moreover, is also a way to avoid claiming credit for giving a gift. Gibbs describes his own practice in raising his children as one in which he never told them that Santa was real, but instead taught them the account of the charity of Nicholas of Myra and elevated the celebration of his feast day on December 6 (31), which should warm the hearts of all who are fond of church history.

The reactionary Gibbs is at his best when he tackles the claim that Christmas has been coopted by commercialism and overrun by materialism, a view that, arguably, has been most popularized by A Charlie Brown Christmas. A look at the world around us in December, according to Gibbs, presents a strikingly different story. December is the time when Americans are most inclined to give, and charity, not materialism, is so deeply entrenched within the traditions of the season that even non-Christians seem unable to resist parting with their possessions. As for commercialism: the bins in the front of Target are full of “cut-rate seasonal detritus” all year long (99). To claim that Christmas is more commercialized or materialistic than the rest of the year is a “rather ludicrous notion,” since these are plainly constants in our society (98-99). I agree with Gibbs’s assessment. It would be reasonable for a preacher to conclude that focusing on the astounding gift of God in the incarnation, and perhaps even praising and commending acts of Christian love and charity during Christmastime, is better than using the season as an opportunity to take aim at the prevailing culture and its obsession with material goods. Let your preaching against materialism wait until the opportune moment presents itself in the lectionary.

Interspersed within these reactionary moments are a number of delightful insights. Gibbs is a strong proponent of Advent practices that help prepare one for Christmas, including ascetic practices. He notes that pretty much everyone still holds to one ascetic tradition: waiting to open presents, which he describes humorously as “a monk-like practice that attends Christmas even for those who turn up their noses at all other forms of worldly renunciation” (73). There is a reminder here that one might choose to fast for reasons other than trying to score points with God, and that, in fact, keeping some sort of Advent fast or note of repentance in the season can be an actual means by which one prepares for a full and joyous celebration of Christmas.

Likewise, Gibbs shows genuine concern for children and commends Christmas as the holiday that most focuses on them, since the Christchild is at the center of the celebration. In between the practical advice, such as involving children in the preparations for Christmas and increasing Christmas joy by filling it with past Christmases (85-86), Gibbs is clearly in awe of the fact that God became man in the weakness of infant flesh.

One of the big disappointments is that this book is not well-edited. There are a few textual mistakes, and more points where the argument would have been shored up by an editor’s judicious use of strike-through. Gibbs also sometimes overdoes it in his attempts to be humorous, and one is given the impression that parts of the book are no more than transcripts of his high school classroom. Lutheran readers will find bits of Orthodox theology poking through in objectionable ways.

That being said, Gibbs did achieve his goal, at least for me. He helped me to appreciate Christmas as the right and proper time to celebrate the birth of Christ, and to accept and embrace the traditions that help us observe the holiday, even if they also cause a bit of frantic busyness at the end of the year. Pastors who read this book will be reinvigorated in their task of bringing good news of great joy to all people on December 25.