Aesthetics are so central to the Christmas season, and yet Christmas aesthetics range so widely. It is a season of light, song, and flavor, and so many of each: warm candlelight alongside plastic neon, ancient hymns alongside jolly jingles, and generational family recipes alongside store-bought icing. Meanwhile, as Advent sermons decry holiday busyness and anti-secularist bumper stickers champion Christocentrism, one might begin to feel self-conscious about one’s fondness for enjoying merriment in the “wrong” aesthetic register. Some of my favorite decorations are, admittedly, a bit kitschy – is that nativity set too cartoonish? Are some entries in my Christmas playlist irreverently secular? Does the Holy Family turn up their collective nose at my go-to Hallmark movie? Is coziness opposed to reverence?

Beauty is, in an abstract way, found across the whole aesthetic spectrum. But, as we celebrate Christ’s Nativity, must we be more selective? I have been informed by the combatants of the liturgy wars that reverence correlates to some art, but not all. Looking into the eyes of the inflatable penguin on my front lawn, I considered the Theological Aesthetics of Christmas, and I turned to Augustine.

In his Enarrationes in Psalmos Saint Augustine poetically praises the infant Christ with this litany on His Divine Beauty:

Beautiful as God, as the Word who is with God, he is beautiful in the Virgin’s womb, where he did not lose his godhead but assumed our humanity. Beautiful he is as a baby, as the Word unable to speak, because while he was still without speech, still a baby in arms and nourished at his mother’s breast, the heavens spoke for him, a star guided the magi, and he was adored in the manger as food for the humble. He was beautiful in heaven, then, and beautiful on earth: beautiful in the womb, and beautiful in his parents’ arms. (44.3, trans. John Rotelle)

Here, Augustine meditates on the Incarnational paradox that God’s glory is made visible not only in splendor, but more profoundly in lowliness. Just as God does not become any less divine in the Incarnation, the Pulcher Deus, the “beautiful God” longed for in Confessions (10.38), does not become any less beautiful by putting on flesh.

The mysterious logic of the Incarnation reconfigures the older and more cautious distinction between the sacred and the profane. The sacred is no longer defined by a separation from “ordinary” life, but rather by God’s saturating presence within it. This does not collapse the distinction between Creator and creature, nor does it undermine divine transcendence, but it is the complete shattering of the presumptuous border between those places where we expect divinity to be found and those places which are not good enough. Greatness itself enters into lowliness, as Augustine acclaims in Sermon 191: “The Maker of man became Man that He, Ruler of the stars, might be nourished at the breast; that He, the Bread, might be hungry; that He, the Fountain, might thirst” (S. 191.1, trans. Mary Sarah Muldowney).

Reverence is, of course, part of an appropriate response to this (alongside an array of dispositions ranging from astonishment to compunction to jubilation); but, in our quasi-liturgical domestic festivities, reverence must not be a chill that repels the warmth of cozy Christmas. It is understandable to be a bit embarrassed by the glitter-covered childhood craft that mom insists on hanging on the tree each year, but never say that it is not good enough for what we are celebrating. Decorate your home in the way that brings your household joy, and if a tacky inflatable delights a child, then the Christ-Child smiles with them. If your family’s favorite Christmas movie is childish or sappy, embrace it – there is no distinction between high culture and low culture around the manger.

He might have despised the theatre, but perhaps Augustine with his Incarnational insight would appreciate a Hallmark movie for what it is. The heart of the Nativity is the discovery of God in an unexpected place. God’s Glory is encountered in all manifestations of Beauty, not only those which we deem “high culture” or “appropriate given the real reason for the season.” This Christmastime, allow tenderness to have the aesthetic primacy. Have no disdain for kitsch, and embrace warmth wherever it is found.