My Christmas lights are already up.
The wrapping paper has been purchased. The shopping is well underway. I've already started working through portions of my Christmas record collection, which means that somewhere between now and December 25th, Vince Guaraldi, Mannheim Steamroller, Andrew Peterson, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and entirely too many other artists will once again become regular guests in our home.
I realize this makes me one of “those people.” The ones who start celebrating Christmas somewhere between when the Halloween decorations come down and when people have finished their Thanksgiving leftovers. I'm okay with that.
I love Christmas.
Always have. And the older I get, the more I think it's because Christmas gathers together three things I've always found compelling: romance, childlike wonder, and the birth of Jesus.
At first glance, those may not seem like they belong in the same sentence. Hallmark movies, children's excitement, and the Incarnation don't exactly occupy neighboring shelves in most bookstores. But I think they share something important.
They're all stories about light entering darkness.
Romance is the story of two people discovering they're not meant to walk through life alone. Wonder is the realization that the world is still larger, stranger, and more beautiful than we've allowed ourselves to believe. And Christmas, at its very center, is the story of God entering a dark world and bringing light with Him.
Maybe that's why the season resonates so deeply.
We spend most of the year learning how to protect ourselves. How to become practical. How to become efficient. How to lower expectations. How to guard against disappointment.
Then Christmas arrives and asks us to become something else. It asks us to hope.
That's not always easy. The world gives us plenty of reasons not to. Look around for more than five minutes and you'll discover enough bad news, outrage, division, cynicism, and anxiety to last a lifetime. Publishing feels noisy. Social media feels noisy. Politics feel noisy. Sometimes even everyday life feels noisy.
Christmas doesn't ignore any of that.
What Christmas does is insist that darkness doesn't get the final word. That's a very different thing, and the thing I want to embody in what I create and how I try to live.
Which brings me to a project I've been quietly working on for a couple of months…
Beginning just after Thanksgiving, I'll be sharing a new collection of short stories called Christmas Time Is Here.
Like Dark Entries, the stories began with songs. But unlike Dark Entries, these stories aren't interested in graveyards, ghosts, monsters, or things that go bump in the night. They're interested in something else.
They're interested in the sort of moments that cause people to pause and look at the world differently. Moments when grace unexpectedly shows up. Moments when relationships are repaired. Moments when hope returns. Moments when people realize they are loved.
Now, before anybody assumes this means I've suddenly become the literary equivalent of a department store Christmas display, let me clarify something. The songs that inspired these stories aren't really the point; they're simply where the stories began. A song can create a mood. It can awaken a memory. It can remind us of something we forgot we were carrying around. But eventually the song steps aside and the story becomes about people. Real people, flawed people, who are carrying wounds, regrets, questions, fears, dreams, disappointments, and hopes.
In other words, people who look a lot like us.
That's especially true at Christmas. For some people, Christmas arrives wrapped in excitement and anticipation. For others, it arrives carrying grief. Some are celebrating new beginnings while others are remembering people who should still be here. Many of us are doing both at the same time. Christmas has always been complicated that way.
And yet somehow it remains beautiful.
Perhaps that's because Christmas isn't beautiful because everything is perfect. It's beautiful because light appears where it shouldn't. Hope appears where it shouldn't. Joy appears where it shouldn't. The Nativity story itself is hardly a picture of ideal circumstances. It's filled with uncertainty, inconvenience, fear, political tension, difficult journeys, and ordinary people trying to make sense of what God is doing.
And yet that's precisely where the light appears. Not in spite of the darkness, but in the middle of it.
That's the spirit that runs through this collection. These stories aren't intended to provide easy answers. They aren't sermons disguised as fiction. They're stories about ordinary people navigating ordinary lives during an extraordinary season. Some lean into romance, while some lean into devotion, and maybe all of them, in some way, lean into wonder. To be sure, all of them are fascinated by the possibility that grace might be closer than we realize.
In many ways, they're exploring some of the same ideas that appeared throughout Dark Entries. They're still asking questions about identity, belonging, hope, redemption, and meaning. They're simply asking those questions beneath a different soundtrack. A brighter and warmer soundtrack that’s filled with Christmas lights and Advent candles and familiar songs drifting through the air.
As I prepared these stories, I kept returning to one of my favorite passages from A Christmas Carol. Scrooge's nephew Fred describes Christmas this way:
"But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time... as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave..."
I've always loved that. Not because it ignores reality, but because it sees reality more clearly. For a brief season, people seem willing to open their hearts. To be generous. To pay attention. To believe that reconciliation is possible. To believe that kindness matters. To believe that perhaps we belong to one another more than we think.
Fred understood something many of us forget: Christmas isn't merely something we celebrate; it's something we practice. We practice generosity. We practice gratitude. We practice wonder. We practice hope. We practice opening our shut-up hearts.
If these stories accomplish anything, I hope that's what they encourage. Not merely Christmas nostalgia or a holiday sentiment. Something deeper and more enduring.
A renewed awareness that light still shines in dark places. That grace still appears unexpectedly. That love still changes people. That wonder still matters. And that the story at the center of Christmas remains as true and beautiful as ever.
So beginning just after Thanksgiving, I’ll begin sending out Christmas Time Is Here, with a new story arriving each week through Christmas.
Pour something warm, turn on the Christmas lights, put on a favorite record, and join me for a season of stories about romance, wonder, devotion, and the Light that overcomes the darkness.
I can't wait to share them with you.
