Epiphany

As it happens, a number of the non-Christmas books I've been reading have key scenes set at Christmas time.  I was re-reading the Harry Potters, including Deathly Hallows, which includes my favorite scene of the series, Harry and Hermione's visit to Godric's Hollow on Christmas Eve.  One of the few things I missed in the new movie was any mention or explanation of the motto on the Potters' grave, "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death."  If you looked carefully, you could see it in the film, but it wasn't referenced by the characters.

On a tangentially related note, I also love Ms. Rowling's epigraph from Aeschylus:

Oh, the torment bred in the race, the grinding scream of death and the stroke that hits the vein, the haemorrhage none can staunch, the grief, the curse no man can bear.

But there is a cure in the house and not outside it, no, not from others but from them, their bloody strife. We sing to you, dark gods beneath the earth.

Now hear, you blissful powers underground - answer the call, send help. Bless the children, give them Triumph now.

Here's an interesting explanation, including the original Greek and a re-translation. I love the idea of "a cure in the house," as Christ came in the incarnation to save sinners from beside them.

I'm also re-reading Les Miserables and had forgotten that Jean Valjean buys back Cosette from the Thenardiers on Christmas Day.  He takes her to Paris, and in the following days:

On her part, Cosette, too, unconsciously underwent a change, poor little creature. [...] from the very first day, all that thought and felt in her began to love this kind old friend. She now felt sensations utterly unknown to her before—a sensation of budding and of growth.

Her kind friend no longer impressed as old and poor. In her eyes Jean Valjean was handsome, just as the garret had seemed pretty.

Such are the effects of the aurora glow of childhood, youth, and joy. The newness of earth and of life has something to do with it. Nothing is so charming as the ruddy tints that happiness can shed around a garret room. We all, in the course of our lives, have had our rose-colored skyparlor.

Nature had placed a wide chasm —fifty years' interval of age—between Jean Valjean and Cosette. This chasm fate filled up. Fate abruptly brought together, and wedded with its resistless power, these two shattered lives, dissimilar in years, but similar in sorrow. The one, indeed, was the complement of the other. The instinct of Cosette sought for a father, as the instinct of Jean Valjean sought for a child. To meet, was to find one another. In that mysterious moment, when their hands touched, they were welded together. When their two souls saw each other, they recognised that they were mutually needed, and they closely embraced.

Taking the words in their most comprehensive and most absolute sense, it might be said that, separated from everything by the walls of the tomb, Jean Valjean was the husband bereaved, as Cosette was the orphan. This position made Jean Valjean become, in a celestial sense, the father of Cosette.

And, in truth, the mysterious impression produced upon Cosette, in the depths of the woods at Chelles, by the hand of Jean Valjean grasping her own in the darkness, was not an illusion but a reality. The coming of this man and his participation in the destiny of this child had been the advent of God.

The coming of a benevolent father on Christmas, you see? An advent.  The father ends darkness and despair, and the child brings love and hope.