The fussy among us argue (correctly) that the Christmas season isn’t over until Epiphany, January 6. And they usually continue that argument by saying that Christmas decorations should stay up until Epiphany and sometimes they’ll remind us of this matter with a meme from Downton Abbey.

To which I respond: Downton Abbey is fiction. And that families in Downton circumstances likely had servants to decorate and undecorate.

So there. 😁

My family has several servants. One we call dishwasher and another we call washing machine and another we call a vacuum cleaner.

Would I want human servants? Probably not. I am painfully middle class.

But what’s more, I’m especially not sure I’d want a servant to take out the tree. Because I like the memories.

Our Christmas tree is a collection of decades of momentos. Places we’ve been, people we’ve known, and events that have happened.

Ornaments from Rome and Prague and New York and Beirut and Tampa, among many others. An ornament my wife gave me when I was singing in a gospel choir at a nearby church. Things our children made. Memories of a lifetime.

A Christmas is not just a Christmas tree. The tree is one of those both joyful and sobering reminders. Of the far past, when God was born in Bethlehem, and the much nearer past, when our lives were brought under the redemption of that child who was born to die.

Every child, no matter how humble or exalted the circumstances of their birth, is a reminder that in each child we touch infinity. The birth of Christ is uniquely so. The young woman named Mary became the only woman to become God’s mother, and she held in her arms the creator of the universe.