Home for the holidays

Most holidays mean going out to do something. On Independence Day, we go to a parade and a fireworks display, perhaps a cookout. On New Year's Eve we often go to First Night or some sort of party. Football competes with dinner on Thanksgiving.

But today, the contrast with the last few weeks is radical. If they were overstuffed with partying, shopping, concert-going, and worrying about time slipping away, today is known for a stillness, an ingathering, a bolting of the doors. The favorite Christmas narrative, from the Gospel of Luke, concerns a traveling family barred from a house, exiled to a shed, later fleeing on a foreign road. Though the Gospel of Matthew says the Magi find the parents and child in a house, virtually all the paintings of the nativity, from the Middle Ages to the present, depict a rude shelter partly open to the sky. Outside, there are blazing stars and baffled shepherds torn from hillside slumbers.

If this is a day for nostalgia and comfort, we can't deny what is really going on. However we make merry, we boreal creatures are uneasy. It is cold and dark outside, nothing grows, and we feel at times that it may be that way forever. We bring a tree into the house and try to keep it green, as if to conjure an early spring.

As the tabletop creche suggests, we are trying to exorcise one of the deepest human fears: exposure to the elements. Not only do we fear literal exposure, we also suspect that if we did not have a house, we might not be fully real. In large part, our decorating and furnishing are not only about making a place of beauty and comfort, but also about arranging the evidence that we were here yesterday and will be here tomorrow. We turn the key, enter, and our house says to us, "Welcome home!" But the open road is indifferent.

We seldom imagine what winter once meant in these latitudes. With luck, people might have had enough food and fuel to get through until spring, but could not be sure of it. Even then, the biting wind often cut through fragile walls. In Clement Moore's "A Visit from Saint Nicholas," it's "Mamma in her kerchief, and I in my cap" because they have to dress warmly to keep from freezing in bed.

The exiles we call the Pilgrims lost half their number, more than 50, their first winter in Plymouth. While they disdained Christmas as a pagan feast (they landed the day after), they, too, were exiles, trying to protect their ill-sheltered young from the elements.

"They had no friends to welcome them, nor inns," wrote William Bradford, "no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor." He adds, "It was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent."

They're still out there, of course, in the stables or on the roads, those without keys in their pockets. We see them on the city grates or under the viaducts, or the lucky ones in overnight shelters. Even if we contribute to their relief, we do not want to look at them today because we know how close to them we are. Even in our sturdy houses, only that monthly mortgage payment sustains us.

We don't always succeed in looking away. One wintry night three years ago, my wife and I took my mother, who was 90, to a Christmas concert of the Boston Camerata, held in a cozy church. As we drove home afterward, we were stopped in traffic. Seated in the front passenger seat, she looked at the license plate on the car in front of us, and said, "Fifty-nine-oh-six. That's the number of homeless people in Boston. It was in the paper today." The result of the annual count had been published. She talked all the way home about what it must be like to be stuck outdoors on such a night.

This, however, is Christmas Day, and for this day, at least, many of us can keep such thoughts at bay by looking at the tabletop creche and thinking of peace on Earth, swaddling clothes, and the hot breath of cattle. The gifts are received and the wassail flows. "Tho' the frost be cruel," as the carol "Good King Wenceslas" says, our windows and doors are tight and locked, our clothes are warm, the heat is on, and spring is sure to come.

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.