One way to keep Christmas joy alive into 2025 is to hold tight to and continue reflecting upon bits of the yuletide vocabulary that our secular culture easily sets aside as humbug.
While some spiritual advisors urge the public only to be mindful of the present moment, we know experiences become more momentous because of memories we’ve made. Our new year is an opportunity to choose some ideas we’ll continue to treasure while others fade away.
Especially at Christmas, we are immersed in a spirit that goes beyond words but gives them rhyme and reason. Centuries of faith have inspired eloquent liturgies and lexicons to be savored. They will reappear in December, but their power to unite and guide us is worthy of recycling year-round.
Keeping the Spirit of Christmas Alive All Year with the Power of Song
Listen up when enduring words and notions slip into the arena of secular discourse, regardless of calendar dates, whether in moments of holiness or scenes from popular entertainment. Remember their splendid presence in carols and other expressions of “the reason for the season.”
Then, apply your own reason to these thoughts grounded in Bethlehem, ensuring they’re relevant wherever life takes you. Such inspirations, harkening to the Word-Made-Flesh, can elevate our wisdom in 2025 to see that “God is with us.”
We can always listen to the profound lyrics that constitute the Christmas soundtrack.
Recall the amalgam of two precious traits—humility and human dignity—miraculously shared by God and humanity:
Mild He lays His glory by
Born that man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of earth, / Born to give them second birth.
—Hark the Herald Angels Sing
Catch the intimations of spiritual warfare against evil into which Christ entered, literally fleshing out our potential for goodness:
No more let sin and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.
—Joy to the World
Honor the simple shepherds whose grassroots wisdom made them responsive to the mystery they couldn’t grasp, as well as the Magi stargazers, whose wisdom told them they didn’t know everything:
If I were a wise man, I would do my part,
Yet what I can, I give him,
I give Him my heart.
—In the Bleak Midwinter
Embrace the love song to a child sung as a prayer for eternal salvation:
Bless all the dear children in Thy tender care,
And take us to heaven to live with Thee there.
—Away in a Manger
These messages can help us “repeat the sounding joy” during this Jubilee Holy Year dedicated to hope, a virtue appropriate to following Christ as joyful, trusting children.
As novelist Gregg Hurwitz said recently in a Daily Wire Plus symposium on current views of the Gospels, “We’re seeing the world burn down, in some ways, to fundamentals”—with new doubts about man vs. machine and male vs. female. He told public intellectual Jordan Peterson and other panelists, ”When we have that level of definitional collapse, we need to go back to forms of thinking. . . that are different.”
Here are several Christmas-adjacent words that, when bandied about in the public square, will deserve appreciative voices that can unlock their deeper meanings:
Finding Epiphanies Every Day: Keeping the Spirit of Christmas Alive All Year
Those whom we catechize and evangelize will profit from awareness of “epiphanies,” or revelations of truth, whenever they occur. These are occasions when God blesses us with knowledge. This recalls Pope Francis’ 2019 message for the Vatican’s World Communications Day: “Love always communicates.”
The Oxford English Dictionary provided a cautionary note in 2016 when it declared that “post-truth” was its “word of the year.” Communication had already started losing its anchors.
In 2024, we saw how polarization, pitting “my truth” against “your truth,” had infected our national politics.
Post-truth practitioners in politics and the media have dumbed down communication by replacing love with antagonism, cynicism, and skepticism. Young people, in particular, crave trust regarding what is known and what is unknown or mysterious.
Too many elites, rejecting God and religion as the best sources of truth, pursue influence through emotional manipulation and oversimplification. Our faith suffers when people adopt the paradigm of “oppressed vs. oppressor” or “victimized vs. victim.”
We need to assure youths that Truth, found in Jesus, inevitably emerges in honest dialogues and human hearts. Reality wins, so we can have hope as we battle on reality’s side.
When we have “eureka moments” that allow us to change our minds, confess our sins, and experience wonder, it’s a blessing from the Lord. Learning lessons does not threaten our self-esteem; they are proof of God's high regard for us. He knows that seeing ourselves and our complicated world more clearly will help us brighten our lives and the lives of others.
In 2024, researchers repeated warnings of society’s tendencies toward isolation, depression, addiction, doubling down on misinformation, and retreating into artificial realities. Many are searching for truth and meaning but don’t know where to look.
Let’s encourage deeper conversations and sharing truth in love to spark imagination, reflection, and accountability. Whether or not it’s Christmastime, we can say gratefully, “Well, that was an epiphany!”
Gifts That Keep Giving: Keeping the Spirit of Christmas Alive All Year
A fuller knowledge of our religious traditions will help young people to share hopeful interpretations of what they see in the secular world. Let’s remind everyone that the Church’s treasure of traditions and knowledge is a gift handed down by parents, families, faith leaders, and church members. It’s God’s alternative to predation by the false views and “confirmation bias” in social media.
Some of our best gift exchanges in 2025 will entail what’s free of charge but especially valuable—information, ideas, and identities that reflect authenticity and create possibilities.
Popular culture in 1965 gave us a charming example of gift-giving. In A Charlie Brown Christmas, the title character speaks for so many of today’s isolated souls when he shouts with frustration, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?”
Charlie Brown’s friend Linus responds to him by reciting the words of Scripture (video from Luke 2:8-14). He repeats the angels’ announcement that Christ the Lord is bringing hope and peace to mankind. “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”
Closing scenes of joy and friendship arise after Charlie’s cry for wisdom, his moment of surrender amid the chaos of a holiday play rehearsal. Linus gave his friend a simple gift of clarity that brought order and solidarity.
Many young folks may never have seen this Charlie Brown special. We should feel free to show the timeless segment from YouTube. We could ask the audience, “Have you ever had a ‘good grief’ moment of frustration like Charlie Brown? Has someone come to you to offer a higher insight, demonstrating the ‘reason for their hope’ as in 1 Peter: 3-15?”
The lesson is that people should be giving gifts all year long, and the most wonderful gifts bestow encouragement through wisdom. Gifts like these honor and boost a person’s own giftedness. They say, “Don’t give up. You can make sense of this situation. God is on your side, present right now.”
Shining a Light in Darkness: Keeping the Spirit of Christmas Alive All Year
Christmas, with its message about a “star of wonder” at the darkest time of year, shone extra brightly on Dec. 25, 2024, because the hopeful feast of Hanukkah, the “festival of lights,” also began that day.
An unlikely popular-culture “parable” speaks the language of “light” in a relevant way for 2025. It encourages us to “look up” from the glare of the screens we watch and from the lower passions we carelessly enable.
The risk that our smartphones and social media convey false enlightenment was captured ingeniously by “The Game,” an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation broadcast in 1991.
This certainly is not a story suited for pre-teens. Teachers will want to make judgments about its content; check it out on Paramount Plus. The plot is about video games and emotional manipulation, whose effects we hope have not already made growing up more toxic.
The Star Trek scriptwriters told the tale of a mysterious, unnamed game the Enterprise crew had brought aboard from an alien planet. A portable optical device, worn with a headband, melded with a person’s mind by piercing the eye with a laser-like beam.
This created an augmented reality in one’s field of vision, akin to today’s high-tech eyeglasses. The solo players used their will to manipulate images in ways that triggered visceral sensations of pleasure. As players kept “scoring,” the game’s images led to stronger feelings and blissful sighs.
Nearly all Enterprise crew members retreated into their own worlds of play and became addicted to what we now might call dopamine hits. They mindlessly cooperated with an alien plot to take over Starfleet. One disciplined, college-age officer saw what was happening and resisted.
“Whatever this thing does, it must feel pretty good,” the young officer opined. His analysis revealed that the device bonded to nerve receptors, degraded higher reasoning, and “initiated a serotonin cascade in the frontal lobe.” In simpler terms, this was prurient “brain rot,” working to weaken a person’s integrity and deaden esprit de corps.
Fortunately, the android Data, immune from the game’s effects, prepared a palm beacon. Pointing the beacon’s bright light at each crew member, the device’s connection was canceled, and the Enterprise was saved.
We can draw approximate parallels between this prescient script and the toll that social media and screen addictions take on too many digital natives today.
The parable’s lesson is clear. It is now a wise, compassionate act for educators to raise concerns about evolving high-tech substitutes for rational thought, to decry “brain rot” where dopamine and self-centeredness distort reality and turn us inward. Our continuing mission must be to point people toward each other, toward the big picture, which includes God. The “light of the world” is a real force.
Waging Peace in 2025: Keeping the Spirit of Christmas Alive All Year
One more bit of Christmas vocabulary is an important takeaway to address the plague of violence that society has crafted for itself. The angels promised that the incarnation of the Prince of Peace would bring hope to those of goodwill.
We were reminded of this in early January when America held a funeral service for former President Jimmy Carter, who died at the age of 100. This fervent evangelical Christian took seriously the Lord’s pathway of love and merciful justice not only during his tumultuous one-term presidency but later as the globe-trotting founder of the Carter Center and a long-time fighter for public health and beneficent democracy.
Most importantly, he said he wanted to be known for championing human dignity and “waging peace.” His vision incorporated many challenging efforts that the world must still undertake, and he embraced America as a place where high aspirations live on.
We can use events like the Carter funeral and the celebration of Martin Luther King Day to tell stories of peace that have their roots in the crib of Jesus.
This is a good year to encourage others through the lives of people like Carter and King, who are model peacemakers and whom the Bible describes as happy and blessed. Echo their call to take action for the sake of peace, becoming beacons of the humble child who was born for healing, sacrifice, and Resurrection.
The Word was made flesh, and so the words of Christmas are inherently meaningful. Let’s allow the message to resound throughout 2025. It has a power that must not be thrown away with a holiday’s unwrapped boxes.
The Word Made Flesh: Keeping the Spirit of Christmas Alive All Year
The work of wisdom involves telling whole stories from beginning to end, making them tangible for all time. Our culture needs to imbibe God’s important lessons repeatedly, but many don’t know all the words. We must teach young people that words matter in every situation and that life’s story is about finding and sustaining hope.
Ongoing vocabulary rehearsals will benefit today’s distracted society. When we revisit the words of Christmas and hear them echo at unexpected times, they have the potential to evoke experiences of joy.
These flow naturally from the Nativity and are just the start of the hopeful story of “God with us.” Its message is a gift that will keep on giving in every life, every day of 2025, and beyond.
