The Vocabulary of Christmas

Writing in The Weekly Standard , my editor Joseph Bottum encourages us to listen to the peculiar, poetic language of Christmas:

[T]here is something more in Advent than just the happenstantial activity of our nativity language, something more than the plain task of getting across a complex seasonal meaning. Reindeer and Santa , swaddling clothes and mangers , ornaments and tinsel , poinsettias and pines . They aren’t things, exactly, around Christmas. They aren’t even ideas, down at the root. They are a vocabulary, most of all, and Christmas is true as poetry—words speaking, each to each—long before it’s true as brute fact. Christmas is one of those moments when the language has been let alone to do what it really wants to do.

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