When I was a kid, like most of us, the Christmas season was about wonder and excitement. It was about the lights and the eggnog and the presents and the time off of school and the orange balls my grandma would make and that one well-worn cassette tape we had of the Grinch. 

Then I got old enough for nostalgia, maybe fourteen or fifteen, and it became about a sweet wistfulness for all of those things, for the long car rides where we read A Christmas Carol aloud, for decorating the tree together, for sitting seven to a couch with my cousins, for loud Christmas duets.

And then, as an adult, maybe sometime late in college, Christmas became about advent. It became about the waiting, the waiting for the coming promise. I would arrive weary at the end of a year, knowing I could watch light dawn gradual and gentle over the dim air around me. There were even times I arrived at the waiting of advent before the calendar did, times my longing for the squirming, wailing Hope of the incarnation was so fierce that my eyes were peeled for stars and my ears were pricked for heavenly choirs early in November.

But that has not been this year. To my slight consternation, this year, I’ve struggled to find my way into the waiting and the wanting. Nothing very adventy seems to be making its way in, no matter how I expose myself to it. Not much stirs within me. I mostly seem capable of just practically and stolidly going about my business, washing sheets and unloading dishwashers and petting cats and putting on my boots.

The other day I remembered the shepherds, though. The shepherds who are just going along, sitting out in the cold of the fields at night as they have for a thousand nights, watching out not for something big and revelatory, but for the small usual bits of danger that might hurt their flock. They are worn and sleepy, living trudgingly in the time being because that’s all they’ve ever known.

—And then a whole celestial choir full of light and cymbals and trumpets and divine voice busts the sky open and descends upon them right then and there and tells them that the most shocking and wonderful of gifts is waiting right around the corner for them, and they can take their cold, calloused, incarnate feet and run them over to the next town and there they’ll find a tiny incarnate God who will grow up to save them all—

It’s quite a turn of events. But that’s the thing about revelation—we don’t know, can’t know, what it actually is, until it breaks upon us, until it is revealed. Whether we wait in blessed expectation or are busy sweeping the kitchen floor and can’t see much past the nose on our own face, the angel’s words are just the same and just as grand and just as world-reversing: “He is Christ the Lord!”

So I think I’m settling in to be a shepherd this year, just going to the field and doing my job and putting gas in my car when it needs it. At some point, that sky will get light and that singing will start and it’ll all wash over me like a flood.