Keeping Christmas...

You’d think I would have learned by now. You’d think I’d know not to get my hopes up. But something about this time of year, something about the anticipation of home during Christmastime always snares my heart. As it should I suppose. There is something unchanging about Christmastime at my house. My mother has decked the house with Christmas regalia, which is always a surprising mix of old and new. I’m not sure when or where she seems to come up with these things, but they always seem to fit and seem as if they’ve belonged there from the beginning.

There’s a small die-cast Santa piggy bank I made in 8th grade shop that I search for every year, which looks more like an elf, hidden amongst the dozen other store bought Santas standing like sentinels atop the mantel. I wonder if anyone’s ever dropped a coin down the slot in his back. There’s a puny little red fedora with a green ribbon that’s been around since my dad was a child which my sister and I used to hide every year and my father would pretend it was lost forever, only to show up in the nick of time high on the Christmas tree while his back was turned. The famous red hat being second only of course to the quilted angel who always looks so uncomfortable crammed on top of the highest bough. I wonder what it’s like for an angel, who makes her home in the heavens, to have to bow her head down just to fit under the ceiling. I guess at least this way she gets to watch all the goings on beneath her station.

The chill air pushes it’s way down the chimney and through the leaky flu and fills the house with the smells of every fire that’s ever been burned in that fireplace. When there is a fire, which is most days, we sit on the raised brick hearth and cook our backs until we can’t take it any more, complaining that the fire really just sucks all the warm air that was left in the house right out the chimney into the night.

So I wonder why then, for all this tradition and warmth, all this wonder and anticipation, Christmas times have been some of the most lonely and sad in my life. Save of all the normal family drama played out year after year which is itself enough to drive most of us mad, why is Christmas, the embodiment of hope for things to come, so often only a painful reminder of things that have yet to come? When Christmas begins to fade, as it does so early in those dark December days, all the lights and candles that just the day before evoked such anticipation seem sadly dim, as if only a memorial that cannot possibly sustain hope until next year.

I remember being in the basement of my house in Virginia one Christmas night as the light had long since faded and most of my family had already gone off to bed. My new switch-track electric race cars whirred and clicked as lap after lap I watched the sparks fly in the dark and listened to the last of the Christmas music from a small transistor radio that somehow ended up in my stocking that morning. I remember being so sad that the day had ended and there I was, in the dark, by myself and nothing had really changed. Surely nothing so great as the anticipation of that day would suggest.

We’re in a tight spot, you and I, stuck between celebrating the birth of our hope for things to come and waiting in darkness for that same Christ to come yet again. For God’s sake please come again. With such little tolerance for waiting and such distaste for the nonchalance of miracle, it seems we’ve traded in celebrating a glimmer of hope as foolish as a baby in a manger for something much much bigger…A machine so powerful, so defiant as to drive darkness completely from the land. To wipe out all evidence that we must wait. We turn Christmas on its head because we can’t bare anything else. We turn Christmas on its head because to face Christmas would mean to smell the dung and feel the chill of the dark night of our lives, which is precisely what we don’t want to do.