Christmas Is a Great Time For Regrets

My dad would have been 94 this month if he had lived. He died at only 70 years old, but he left a big mark in the lives of those he loved -- and he loved a lot of people. He was a loud and gregarious lover of people.

In 1971 my dad took our family to New York City to see the opening of the new musical Scrooge, starring Albert Finney, at Radio City Music Hall. While in New York we toured the NBC studios where, in one hallway, they had a glass case containing all of the figurines they had used to film the famous stop-motion animation Christmas movie Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in 1964. I was mildly disappointed as a kid when I discovered that, in real life, the abominable snowman is only eight inches tall.

The showing of Scrooge was combined with the famous Radio City Christmas show, complete with an elaborate nativity that featured camels and sheep parading down the aisles of the theater. It was a memorable experience for a little kid, and the result has been that the musical version of Scrooge has loomed large in my memory of Christmas ever since.

Every good story - every single one - always gets around to dealing with the question of redemption. Even writers who eschew Christianity often can’t help dealing with the question because it is the great, inescapable problem of the universe.

It is impossible to understand redemption without acknowledging the thing that opens our eyes to our need for it. The entire plot of “A Christmas Carol” deals with the redemption of a man who has lost his way, coming to love things themselves rather than the giver of things. The visits of the ghosts have their intended effect, conjuring up the power of regret in old Scrooge’s heart. Regret for what has been lost to the past, the opportunities being squandered in the present, and the eventual outcome that old Scrooge’s choices portend. And while we would like to look at Scrooge from an emotional distance, we end up grappling with the very same dilemma in our own lives as we watch him.

Charles Dickens was far from the only person to notice the regret that eventually follows when we turn our values upside down by exchanging a love for people with a love for things. “The stuff of Earth competes for the allegiance I owe only to the Giver of all good things” - so said Rich Mullins in his song If I Stand. The self-destructive attachment to things ought to haunt any of us who are serious about our faith.

But regret can be a beautiful thing when it leads us to make important changes. Scrooge is entirely transformed by the regret conjured up by the spirits. And on the heels of Scrooge’s transformation, his newfound love and altered priorities begin to exhibit themselves in a celebration of giving and generosity.

As Scrooge celebrates in the streets of the city, he stumbles upon his nephew, whom he has long neglected and unjustly despised. And during this meeting, the seed of regret, planted by the ghosts, flowers into loving reconciliation. Offering gifts to his nephew, Scrooge confesses, “These are for you, from an old fool who deeply regrets the Christmases gone by that he might have shared with you.”

And, as an adult, it is at this point in the story that I always want to cry.

There is something powerfully moving about Scrooge’s confession. The simplicity and honesty are beautiful, to be sure. But what moves me, I think, is the lack of evasion, or of any veiled qualification at all. He makes no attempt to shield himself from the full weight of his own wrongdoing and the resulting regrets.

How different this is from so many of the public apologies one hears, in which, having done something wrong, a public figure apologizes not for what they did but for how other people perceived it. The lack of sincerity in such cringeworthy apologies causes the bile to boil up in the back of my throat. And the taste of it doesn’t improve with time.

But it isn’t just public figures who do this. A genuine apology is a hard thing for everyone, and I suspect can only really be offered without qualification if regret is deep and sincere. It is a rare and beautiful thing to behold. How many times do we offer or receive apologies that are salted with lies or evasions? How often are apologies softened by faux-justifications instead of being given fully, without reservation?

It is the honest brokenness of Scrooge’s confession that makes me want to cry.

There’s a Hallmark Christmas movie that has one of these moments. (I don’t want to hear any guff about Hallmark movies. I know they’re not Shakespeare. I know that there is a lot of marshmallow cream sloshing around at the Hallmark channel. But that doesn’t mean all of their movies are completely devoid of profound moments. If you haven’t watched any of the Signed, Sealed, and Delivered series, you should.)

In 2009, Hallmark made a Christmas movie called Mrs. Miracle. One of the subplots involved the long-term estrangement of two adult sisters. One of the sisters deeply wronged the other, and during the intervening years has come to be filled with regret over her actions. The sister who was wronged has, for years, been unwilling to forgive. In the movie, a personal crisis convinces the wronged sister of her own lack of forgiveness, motivating her to reach out to the sister who had injured her so many years ago. The sister who committed the original wrong, seeing her sister standing at the front door, omits any of the customary niceties and just immediately sobs out the words, “Forgive me?”

Cue the tears. Especially if you have ever had someone you love deeply from whom you have become estranged.

I stopped watching Hallmark a long time ago because I stopped paying for cable TV. But I’m not sure I recall many of those Hallmark movies that didn’t, at some level, deal with the question of reconciliation. A delightful feature of Hallmark, of course, is that all conflicts can be resolved in just one hour and forty minutes. Real life doesn’t usually work out that way, I’m afraid. In real life some people would quite literally rather die than admit their own wrongdoing and apologize. Real life is both more painful and more meaningful than it's rendered in TV movies. But I still think the Hallmark producers were onto something. There is more going on at the Hallmark Channel than the obvious fact that some of those actors are getting much too old to still be dating.

I wonder if the thing that really resonates with much of Hallmark’s audience is the power of forgiveness on the other side of estrangement. Regret is a beautiful thing if it leads us toward making sincere apologies. It may actually be the only thing that can lead us to make sincere apologies. At Christmas we celebrate the opening salvo in the greatest act of reconciliation ever known. But the awkward part is, we each owe God a heartfelt apology. We may owe others an apology, too. This is a good year to let our own regrets adorn our lives in such a way that true apologies flow from our lips - unhindered and without qualification - wherever they are called for.

Christmas is a great time for regrets.