For Christmas light, look to the children

Opinion editor's note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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In any given year, somewhere around 70,000 babies are born in Minnesota. On Christmas Day, it's natural to wonder whether one of them might turn out to be divine, or at least destined for great things. It's anybody's guess, but each of them holds unknowable potential, as well as a strange power over others.

If you are lucky, maybe you have a baby in the family right now. Then you know something of the mysterious abilities an infant brings into the world.

A baby can work miracles among the non-babies in its orbit. A baby can reduce grown-ups to babbling fruitcakes. An uncle who rarely smiles may find himself grinning and giggling. An angry conversation about politics may abruptly hush because the baby is stirring. Political disagreements and personal conflicts are suddenly irrelevant, and inappropriate besides.

And when a baby is in the house during the Christmas season, phrases like "Oh come, let us adore him" take on new meaning. Unto us a child is born.

Is this how the Christmas miracle works, has always worked? Was Jesus an unbelievably cute baby whom everybody wanted to hold, even if he kept spitting up on the shepherds' cloaks and wise men's robes? Did he inspire peace because his presence took all the fun and point out of arguing?

It has something to do with new beginnings, a promise of goodwill and hope in a world that too often seems battered and forlorn. One might hear that same promise in a hundred different settings, in a marriage proposal or a polling place or a 12-step meeting. Or in the cry of a baby.

We Americans have no national religion — we are far better off without one — but we do have a National Christmas Tree, and some radio stations that play holiday music as though their FCC licenses depended on it. At their core, though, these are secular gestures. Humans have decorated with evergreens at midwinter since so-called pagan times, perhaps to affirm their faith that the snow and cold will not quite succeed in killing us.

And yet the snow and cold continue to try. Winter storms, and storms generally, are increasing in their ferocity and lethality, thanks to human-caused climate change. Gathering with friends around a fire and decorating our homes with holly, ivy, and fir trees may be whistling past the graveyard, but these are ways of reassuring ourselves that we will survive. In the bleakest of midwinters, green things give us the promise of renewal.

As does the birth of a baby. Each birth is another new beginning, evidence that the world may yet turn toward innocence and beauty.

The war in Ukraine rages on, killing children by the hundreds; poverty the world over grinds children down and holds them back; monsters with guns massacre children on a scale Herod could only dream of. Our country's infant mortality rate compares unfavorably to those of other developed nations.