“Suppose a child gets separated from his mom in the grocery store. He panics and runs to the end of an aisle, not knowing where to go. But just before he starts to cry, he sees her shadow at the end of the aisle. He starts to feel hope. But what is better? The happiness of seeing the shadow, or having his mom step around the corner and seeing that it’s really her? That’s what Christmas is. Christmas is the replacement of shadows with the real thing.”

I love at the end of The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis how they all discover that what they had known as Narnia and the real world was merely a shadow and a copy of the real thing. Once they see the true Narnia, they know that they have at last really and truly come home.

It’s like seeing a painting or photograph of a sunset versus actually witnessing the sunset in person. As good as the artist is in faithfully reproducing the imagery, it still can’t compare with the real thing.

Advent is a reminder that we’re living in the Shadowlands. Christmas is a reminder that the real thing is breaking through and displacing the shadows. All of our best hopes and desires and wishes, everything that we ever loved in this world, will be in the real thing in their purest and truest forms.

Christmas means that hope is born and the light has come.