Another's faith or what Christmas means to them isn't anything I dwell on beyond what this time of year represents for me. When it comes to my personal belief and the coming of Christmas each year I guard that very closely and never do I feel any urgency to explain it or all the reasons I celebrate the season.
I have had the good fortune my entire life to enjoy all that Christmas brings while being surrounded by people who understand that; and when I watch or listen to debates over why some celebrate it as I do or why others do not, nothing has ever changed my interpretation of seeing religious images depicting the first one, nor what commercialism and capitalism has turned it into and continues to profit from. For them it is Black Friday's that can linger for a month or more and other clever marketing schemes to restore bottom lines that didn't perform as well as they might have hoped from January through October.
But I am also okay with that because we all have to make a living somehow and most of us enjoy believing we are getting bargains and great deals even if common sense tells us differently. Buying and selling more commerce during the weeks leading up to Christmas is how we celebrate what has been depicted in Nativity displays longer than any of us have been alive; we only honor the tradition by keeping it going year-after-year.
We buy it, wrap it and then hope the recipient believes as we do that we did good! Some of us worry that we haven't done enough and when that happens we offer condolences to ourselves that it was the thought that counted and we hope the other person shares that sentiment if they were disappointed! It happens to me every year but I don't dwell much on that either.
The merry wishes for everyone we care about to have a happy Christmas and to be able to celebrate in ways that bring them joy and comfort not only at this time but throughout the coming new year is wrapped in garland, tinsel, bright lights and song regardless of what is beneath the tree or donated to people we don't know, and if we mean it when we say it that should suffice when the other things we do or say don't.
For me the journey from Thanksgiving to Christmas is all of the above with a few side-bars; they include the approach of winter, which for all of the challenges and hardships it can create is still my favorite season. I enjoy seeing snow and walking in it and I am reminded of the joys of sleds and ice-skates when I was young and unbreakable if I crashed on a hill or lost my balance on a frozen pond.
The older I get the more frequently I am reminded that either of those mishaps would likely be a death sentence for me now, and why I have enough sense to no longer own skates or a sled! But I wish I could and if I did I would probably risk come-what-may at least one more time in my life because that is another side-bar to my own joys of the season. The memories that refuse to ever fade of a world that somehow didn't seem as cold in winter as it does now.
This is when I miss everything and everyone that is gone more than at any time of the year, but it is also when things happen or people show up that remind me of them. The Saturday evening before Christmas I and others around me wait on our porches (regardless of the weather) for total strangers that make up an impromptu choir accompanied by a horn player to come-a-caroling; it is a tradition that started years ago and for those few songs they sing in front of one house to the next we all seem to know each other.
Glad tidings of musical joy that only happens once a year but well worth the wait!
The other homes and businesses around me are decorated for the occasion and the area becomes the images we see in our mind's eye when we hear those sentimental and time honored melodies, and when the week ahead comes and goes we will wait another year, and when it comes we will complain about some who jump the gun and begin preparations too early. I do that too; I might see a Christmas tree in a window before Thanksgiving and wonder about it myself even when my own tree may already be up by then. But then a few days or a week passes until once again everyone is back in the spirit!
In a sentence, that is what the season is about for me, spirit, and our personal reasons for feeling it.
I won't be in church on Christmas Day, but I will watch with hope and enthusiasm the Pope's message on television on Christmas Eve just as I have in years past. For me that is what will be left of a season full of anticipation, culminating when the last one leaves our 59th consecutive traditional family gathering (in the same house) that night. I watch them put on their coats and we hug, wish one another Merry Christmas and one by one they go and I wonder if we will all be able to do it again next year.
Then it is only me, seeing and hearing what the crowd that has gathered in St. Peter's Basilica came there for. The family will be gone and I'll be in a room where hours before they all took time from their busy schedules to journey home for awhile. The tree will be still be lit and the outside lights will stay on until morning when the 11 month wait will once again commence for the next one.
It is within these pauses in the journey to Christmas Day that I try to take in and savor as much as I possibly can, more this year than last year, and more then than the year before because as life goes and age will have it no one can be sure how many more we will be allowed to take. Too many of my peers won't have another one and all of us could be trudging through our last.
That first journey to Christmas shown in the photo above might have been something like that for Mary and Joseph; anxious and needing to get where they were going, but perhaps uncertain of what lie ahead.
Safe travels, and Merry Christmas!
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