Realistic. The essence of the Christmas message is that it is realistic to be optimistic, to have hope. That is the message we implicitly know when we gaze upon the manger scene; that is the message we implicitly know when we gaze upon our children: the reality of hope - the word that no matter how grim or dismal one's condition, that condition is not hopeless. So on Christmas we give, or ought to, in symbolic celebration of God's having given Christ to us.
The story of the babe lying in a manger has lived through the ages. It has endured. It has survived confusions, absurdities, paradoxes, intellectual iconoclasm and relentless efforts to wipe out its every trace. Since the Incarnation, indeed, there have been efforts a million times over to explain it all away. There have been cynics to challenge the veracity of the infancy narratives. There have been historicists, the current ones telling us, for instance, that the Star of the Davidic Messiah leading the Magi to Bethlehem was simply a stellar flare-up. Today the story faces perhaps its most systematic and ruthless - and most threatening - challenge, in the form of a religiously fervent atheism that seeks to substitute man for God.
Yet the efforts of all the "realists" are essentially irrelevant to the fact of Christ's birth - about which there is little serious doubt. And in that birth, mankind finally was infused with a purpose for life. Now, in Tennyson's words, "the time draws near." As it does, as we approach the feverish giving and getting, we dare not lose in an ocean of wrapping paper the message of purpose and hope brought by the man from Galilee.
The wish for you is both - purpose and hope - today, and every day throughout the year. And a merry Christmas, too.