Merry Christmas for the City
If I could summarize my experience of this year’s Christmas for the City in a single word, I choose peace. Peace can mean many different things, but I refer to peace not as only the absence of conflict, but rather a peace that also informs a deeper, more abiding sense of belonging, hopefulness, and rootedness in time and place.
How do you describe a Christmas party with the audacious goal of serving a broad cross-section of a whole city, fueled by the generosity of businesses, the passion of nonprofits, and the sweat of anyone and everyone willing to show up? I can’t say what it was like for the thousands of guests, volunteers, performers, and clean up crews, but you could not deny the thick atmosphere of peace created by a small army of busy hands and rubber soles that crafted this year’s experience.
Coffee, cookies, and cakes rolled in on vans and pushcarts. Tables arrayed with Legos, crafts, hand-cut painted cars for children to assemble. A rotating stage of dulcet voices echoing throughout thronging halls of strangely friendly strangers.
I arrived at Christmas for the City unsure of which Winston-Salem I would be at. The local news tells me about our bifurcated city, torn between arts and innovation, poverty and segregation, the progress of entrepreneurs and the decay of old industry. We are bathed in shine, covered in rust, celebrating and mourning at the same time.
But on this night I see what we could be. There is a fight for something good happening around me. I see it in the generosity of warm strangers helping and serving one another without a second of hesitation. I see it through kids creating, painting, building, and playing. I notice older, grayer children, slowed by the decades of time, fiery and purposeful to make a difference. I sit next to others, making this next meal last as long as possible because they will soon be hungry again. Each fight is personal, each fight matters.
I’m at a party for everyone, young, old, rich, poor, in the Christmas spirit or far from it. It is messy, mushy, and ripe. Teens add their name to a sprawling mural upstairs. A rapper energizes a room next door. A mom snatches her kid away from other children she deems too rowdy. A musical act perhaps overstays their welcome. We are getting along, mostly, in a civic partnership that is generous, ecumenical, and surprisingly rare.
I hope everyone felt the same love I did in the music, meals, and man-made locomotion. While none of the biggest problems facing our city were erased during a one night event at the Benton, for that one evening, it did feel like a truce of sorts. The devil of Winston was not quartered this evening because just this once, we would not allow it.
Instead I saw peace, born anew in the people of this city in brief moments, through loving gestures, and with big hearts. I don’t expect every day to be Christmas but it sure is nice to live in it with ten thousand of your closest friends in a cavernous warehouse on the corner of West Fifth Street. A truce is nice, but peace is better.
The ancient prophet Isaiah spoke of a royal child who would one day be born into this world. Isaiah imagined that this prince would establish a peace on earth so profound that it would indeed last forever. Christians, and many others alike, still wait for the fullness of that peace. So we have a celebration, a birthday party open to all, in which we declare a child imbued with enough justice and righteousness to transform our time and place into an abiding, everlasting, hopeful peace.
Merry Christmas for the City!
Marc Madrigal, January 7, 2020