What does it mean to keep Christmas?

Something occurred to me only this holiday week.

I, like many others, more eagerly anticipate Christmas each year, and each year more deeply mourn its passing. Our holiday hopes are increasingly greater, which only means they are dashed from a greater height.

Have you ever read and reread something, over and over, knowing there is some little truth in there, some kernel of insight, but you just can't get at it?
I've felt that way for years about Dickens' final words on Scrooge:

...and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.

What does it mean to keep Christmas? I've come to the conclusion it has very little to do with the preparation and celebration of the season. It's how you observe it afterwards; that is the hard part, and Dickens' tone suggests as much.

The impetus for this conclusion was my son coming to visit this weekend, a week after Christmas, and me of course leaving the tree up and the stockings hung, and asking myself, "Why must Christmas end just because a day on the calendar has past?"

It shouldn't. Most familiar morality tales of Christmas recount permanent changes to characters bereft of love and kindness (as agents or objects): Scrooge learns how to keep Christmas, the Grinch's heart grows three sizes, misfit toys go to live with loving children, etc.

Even so, there is one night out of all the rest that I like to stay up late, alone, the most peaceful night of the year, Christmas Eve, the one night when the world stops, even if only for a few hours, and collectively looks inward for that love and kindness.

Keeping Christmas is the ability to observe its spirit even after the world stops celebrating, when you feel like the party is over and everyone's gone home.

It sounds elementary, and perhaps it is. Perhaps that is why children understand it so well, and why it took me so many years to rediscover what I've known all along.

As it turns out, family events are postponing a formal end to Christmas another week. There remains a stocking stuffed with goodies hanging from the mantle, and the tree still sparkles through the night, a few unwrapped presents underneath lending a legitimacy that otherwise might slowly evaporate after New Year passes. I obtained some old TV shows I'd planned to watch but will wait - odds and ends from the 70s that only those who lived them would find interesting: Donny and Marie, Rich Little, and a little Jimmy Stewart story that's nothing like It's a Wonderful Life and apparently never caught on. I've seen none of them since they first aired.