he days when Christmas was a feast seized from the leanness of winter, the last echo of a receding harvest, are long gone for most of us. The year-round abundance of modern America has done a lot to extinguish the very idea of seasonality, except as a matter of decoration. There's a freedom in that view of life — the feeling that any one day is as good as the next — but there's a constraint, too. In all the old legends of Christmas, all the old visions, Christmas contains a sense of release, of surrendering to the day, as well as a sense of hallowedness. The best Noel tales are always those about giving in to Christmas after long resistance. Ebenezer Scrooge and the Grinch may be lost sheep, in the New Testament sense, but they also embody the spirit of release after years and years of vigilant self-defense. To call what this day offers "redemption" is to call it something too narrow. To give in to Christmas is to give in to optimism for the nature of humankind, to what Christians, and many others as well, would call the divine spark in human flesh.

The purest expression of that seasonal hope has always been universal peace. The familiar phrase is "Peace on Earth" — so familiar, in fact, at this time of year that it seems like mere metaphor as you sing it while harking to herald angels. And perhaps that metaphorical quality, that sense of near-impossibility, is what we were meant to hear in the gospel when, in the words of the King James Version, the angels proclaimed, "Peace on earth, good will toward men." Have humans ever been able to bring this entire globe to peace at once? The answer is almost certainly not. But that answer is no deterrent to trying to do so, no obstacle to the hope that renews itself with particular freshness at this time of year. In a world of grim politics and seemingly native cynicism, the very hope of universal peace may appear naïve. But the most important hopes are often the naïve ones, the ones that re-express a forgotten innocence. In all the clutter of Christmas meanings, in the rush and burden that almost engulfs this day, that hope is still its truest meaning.

Most of us naturally assume that the search for universal peace lies in the hands of governments and the men and women who shape them. But the premise of this very day is that the search for universal peace begins within each of us. The resilience of this holiday, the way it seems to clutch at our emotions in the most unexpected ways, comes as much from the sense of individual promise it arouses in each of us as from the rituals of shopping and giving gifts to one another.

We postpone our resolutions till the new year, but if we have resolutions to make, they awaken today. Through the lights and the wrapping paper, over the sounds of music and what for many of us has become a quiet celebration, we take the risk of imagining a better world, containing better versions of ourselves. To imagine that world and those people takes "mercy mild" and the willingness to give in to this festival in the darkest time of the year. It takes the hope that "Peace on Earth" isn't merely a relic from an old, old tale, an impossible wish overheard in the night.