Maybe his head wasn’t screwed on right. Maybe his shoes were too tight. Maybe his heart was too small.
Whatever the reason was, the Grinch, Dr. Seuss tells us, hated Christmas, an attitude that put him at odds with his neighbors, the Whos of Whoville, who liked Christmas —a lot.
And Dr. Seuss’s poem goes on to say that the Grinch, who had put up with Christmas for 53 years, tried to stop it from coming again by stealing the presents and the food and the Christmas tree —and even the log from the fireplace —from every house in Whoville.
But when he had done that, he was shocked to find that the Whos celebrated Christmas anyway.
And the Grinch, after thinking that over, finally realized that Christmas was not about material things.
“Maybe Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”
One of the most interesting things about the poem is what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say anything about Christmas.
We get the message that Christmas is not about food and presents, but Dr. Seuss left us on our own to answer this question: If Christmas were stripped of all the romantic and nostalgic trappings that it has accumulated over the years, would we still celebrate it – and what would we celebrate?
There’s an obvious answer.
We would still observe in some way the birthday of Jesus, the messiah, but would we do it with quite the same enthusiasm if we didn’t have the lights and the cookies and the Wii and the diamond earrings?
We should be enthusiastic—even without the tinsel—because what we are observing on Christmas is a turning point in God’s relationship with the human race.
We are observing the fact that God was so determined to restore men and women to the grace that had been lost by Adam and Eve that he himself took on human form and, by his ministry and sacrifice and resurrection, made humanity fit once and for all for everlasting life.
Is this too abstract, too theological to be exciting?
God thinks so much of the human beings he has created that he himself takes on the form of a man and is born as an infant child and lives and dies and overcomes death in a particular time and place in history—and human beings are never the same.
That’s the “little bit more” that Christmas is about, not singing and eating and gift-giving and gift-getting.
Do all these other things have a place in Christmas? All these things that the Grinch took away?
Remember what the Grinch did once he realized that there was a deeper meaning to Christmas: He returned everything he had taken and then joined in the celebration he used to hate.
The excited and noisy children, the bells and the singing, and the big Christmas dinners that used to annoy him so much no longer bothered him.
And that’s because he had had it backwards; he had thought these things in themselves were important to people, and now he realized for the first time that they were only signs of exuberance and generosity.
At one time or another we all question the trouble and expense we go through at Christmas time; we wonder why we bother and what it all means.
And while things we acquire out of excess and greed are never good for us, that doesn’t mean we must dismiss all the traditions of this season.
When we’re in that mood, we can recall what the Grinch learned after 53 years—that all the fixings that give Christmas its sounds and its tastes and its colors are the expressions of human hearts nearly bursting with the joy of this day, bursting with joy because Jesus Christ is born.
Charles Paolino is a member of the RENEW staff and a permanent Deacon in the Diocese of Metuchen.
