Today I would argue that our current cultural understanding of Christmas isn't as a time of excess but as a time of fervor.

The message of the angel is as scandalous and striking now as it was then. For in it is embedded God’s message in the death and resurrection of Jesus: to trust and believe in the invincibility of the good in spite of the titanic reality of evil, because God is good all the time.

Christmas was not, for me, a time of joy and happiness, and it certainly wasn’t yet about celebrating God in the flesh having been born among us. Christmas was just lonely and sad.