Sacred Time
Unwrapping Christmas
Interview with Will Bourne
The conversation begins where Christmas becomes more than a date on the calendar. For some, the season carries joy and remembrance. For others, it gathers pressure, grief, debt, religious fear, or family expectations that are difficult to name.
Will Bourne invites readers to separate Christ from the weight that customs are often asked to carry. The exchange examines incarnation, history, conscience, grief, consumerism, family difference, and the freedom to receive, revise, or release a practice without contempt.
Why did you write Unwrapping Christmas?
I wrote this book because Christmas often carries more moral and emotional weight than people know how to name. In some homes it is a joyful remembrance of Christ. In others it is a season of debt, pressure, grief, religious fear, or unresolved family expectations. Sometimes all of those realities are present at once. I wanted to make room for an honest Christian conversation that did not begin by demanding celebration or condemning it. My concern is formation. What are our practices teaching us to love, fear, perform, purchase, remember, or avoid? The book helps readers examine those questions while keeping Christ larger than the season. It is an invitation to tell the truth, honor conscience, protect people from coercion, and make decisions that remain accountable to Scripture, wisdom, responsibility, and love.
What does the title Unwrapping Christmas mean?
The title describes the work of separating what has been bundled together. Christmas can contain the incarnation, family memory, commercial scripts, inherited customs, national culture, church programming, grief, generosity, nostalgia, and disputed historical claims. Those things are not identical, even when they arrive in the same season. To unwrap Christmas is to examine each layer without panic. It means asking what is historically supported, what is theological, what is merely customary, what is harmful, what is beautiful, and what our household can receive with integrity. The goal is not to strip the season of meaning. It is to stop asking one date or collection of customs to carry what only Christ can carry.
Are you trying to convince Christians to stop celebrating Christmas?
No. I am also not trying to convince every Christian to celebrate it. The book refuses both commands because Scripture does not make Christmas observance a condition of belonging to Christ. Some readers will celebrate with renewed gratitude. Some will simplify. Some will abstain. Some will remain undecided while they study and pray. The important question is not whether everyone reaches one practice. It is whether our decisions are honest, loving, teachable, and responsible before God. Participation does not prove spiritual maturity, and abstention does not prove purity. Christ is Lord in either case, and our treatment of one another matters.
Does the Bible give a date for the birth of Jesus?
No. The Gospels locate the birth of Jesus within real history, but they do not identify December 25 or provide enough information to establish an exact date with certainty. That limitation matters. It means Christians should not present a traditional date as though Scripture directly revealed it. It also means the absence of a date does not make the incarnation less historical. The Word became flesh. Jesus was born, lived, died, rose bodily, ascended, and will come again. Christian faith rests on Christ and the apostolic witness, not on our ability to reconstruct a birthday the text does not supply.
Was December 25 simply copied from a pagan holiday?
That common statement is more confident than the surviving evidence permits. Early Christian calculation, symbolism surrounding the solstice, Roman calendars, developing liturgical practice, and solar observances all belong in the discussion. Scholars disagree about their relationship and sequence. The evidence does not justify the slogan that the church simply copied one established pagan birthday and renamed it. At the same time, Christians lived inside Roman culture and did not develop their calendars in a historical vacuum. The responsible position is neither denial nor sensationalism. We should acknowledge influence, adaptation, contest, uncertainty, and the limits of the record.
Why can celebration feel like pressure?
Celebration becomes pressure when joy is treated as a duty people must visibly perform. Financial limits, grief, chronic illness, work demands, family conflict, trauma, and different convictions do not disappear because a calendar says celebration has arrived. When invitations become tests of loyalty, gifts become measures of love, or emotional brightness becomes the admission price for belonging, the season stops functioning as an invitation. A faithful community can make room for delight without forcing delight. It can communicate expectations clearly, share labor, respect limits, and allow people to participate according to actual capacity.
How should Christians respond to grief during the holidays?
We should begin by refusing to make grief perform. An empty chair, changed relationship, death, estrangement, infertility, illness, or lost future may become especially visible during a season organized around memory and gathering. The grieving person does not need to protect everyone else from reality. We can name the loss, ask what support would help, accept that emotions may change during the day, and make room for someone to arrive late, leave early, decline, or remember the absent person. Christian hope does not require emotional denial. Resurrection hope tells the truth about death while refusing to grant death the final word.
How do you distinguish forgiveness, trust, reconciliation, and access?
Forgiveness is not permission for continued harm. Trust concerns whether a person has become reliable. Reconciliation involves a relationship restored through truth, repentance, repair, and conditions that make renewed relationship possible. Access concerns who may enter your home, time, body, finances, or children’s lives. These realities may be related, but they are not interchangeable. A Christian may pursue forgiveness while limiting access. Reconciliation cannot be manufactured by one person or demanded on a holiday timetable. Clear distinctions protect both grace and truth from becoming slogans that serve coercion.
What do you mean when you say the incarnation is not a calendar event?
I mean that the incarnation is a once-for-all act of God in history, not an event created by our annual observance. The eternal Word became flesh whether or not a household marks December 25. A calendar can help Christians remember and teach, but it does not make Christ present by its own power. This distinction protects both theology and practice. It allows a celebration to serve remembrance without becoming necessary for salvation, and it allows abstention without suggesting the incarnation has been diminished.
What is conscience, and why is it not infallible?
Conscience is our inward moral awareness and judgment. It matters because acting against conscience can train us to disregard what we presently believe faithfulness requires. Yet conscience can be misinformed, wounded, oversensitive, underdeveloped, or shaped by fear and culture. Therefore, conscience must be honored and formed. We should not coerce people to violate it, and we should not treat every strong feeling as God’s final verdict. Scripture, prayer, evidence, wise counsel, community, experience, and the fruit of our actions can all participate in conscience formation.
How does Romans 14 guide disagreement about Christmas?
Romans 14 gives us a way to understand disputable practices without making them trivial. Believers may regard days differently while belonging to the same Lord. Each should act in faith and give an account to God. The stronger must not despise, and the more restrictive must not condemn. Love limits the use of liberty when our conduct pressures another person toward what they believe is sin. Romans 14 does not mean everyone receives veto power over everyone else. It means liberty, conscience, responsibility, and neighbor-love remain accountable to Christ.
How does consumerism form people during Christmas?
Consumerism does more than sell products. It trains desire, organizes attention, ranks households, and suggests that love can be measured through spending. Repetition matters. Advertising, urgency, scarcity, comparison, and social display can form us before we consciously agree with their messages. The answer is not to call every purchase materialistic. Material gifts can be generous and useful. The work is to notice what a gift is being asked to carry, refuse debt used to maintain appearances, and make spending decisions within truthful household capacity.
How does the book address depression, trauma, and crisis?
It addresses them pastorally without pretending pastoral language replaces qualified care. Not every painful holiday experience is trauma, and not every sadness is a clinical disorder. Those distinctions protect people from both dismissal and careless diagnosis. When someone faces persistent hopelessness, thoughts of self-harm, inability to remain safe, abuse, or immediate danger, spiritual reflection should move alongside direct support, crisis intervention, medical or mental-health care, and safety planning. Seeking help is not a failure of faith. It may be one of hope’s most concrete actions.
How does Unwrapping Christmas connect with the rest of the Sacred Time series?
The series examines four occasions through a shared formation movement: history, pain, theology, formation, and practice. Unwrapping Christmas considers light, incarnation, conscience, and seasonal meaning. Resurrecting Easter turns toward death, resurrection, hope, and performance faith. Born on Purpose examines birth, identity, stewardship, and the gift of being here. Covenant Over Time addresses marriage, memory, faithfulness, and witness across the years. Each book stands alone, but together they ask how Christians inhabit time without allowing dates, customs, milestones, or institutions to become substitutes for Christ.
What do you hope readers carry away from the book?
I hope readers leave with less fear and more responsibility. I want them to know they do not have to defend Christmas as though the gospel depends upon it, and they do not have to reject Christmas as though a date or object possesses power Christ has not given it. They may celebrate with gratitude, abstain with integrity, revise what they inherited, or remain undecided while they study and pray. None of those choices saves them. Christ does. The invitation is to live inside time awake, receive what can serve truth and love, release what requires falsehood or harm, hold human tradition lightly, and hold fast to Christ.
A Closing Invitation
The invitation is to unwrap the season without making Christ smaller. Tell the truth about what Christmas carries, honor conscience, protect people from coercion, and let presence become more important than performance. Resurrecting Easter continues the series by bringing the same careful discernment to death, resurrection, grief, and hope.
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