Christmas from Elizabeth Moon …
Christmas bothers some people and makes others happy for divergent reasons. Non-Christians resent its popularity (and so do some Christians, for whom it should be, they say, a purely religious occasion.) But retailers of all religions (or none) know it’s “good for business” as they stock up on the best selling merchandise for gifts, feasts, and other celebrations. Store clerks exhausted by longer hours and thoughtless shoppers nonetheless look forward to better year-end bonuses if the stores are crowded. Families look forward to traditional celebrations and getting together, and dread them, with equal intensity. Musicians count on the income from all the celebrations and arrive cheerful for the midnight service Christmas eve, brass and strings in hand… hoping this last of the holiday opportunities for a gig will carry them through bleak January and the bulk of Lent.
I remember my mother working late in the hardware store on Christmas Eve, when almost all the stores on Main Street stayed open until the last customer deciding between a fishing lure or new hammer for Dad, or cookie cutters or a hand mixer for Mom (or, in other stores, a pair of shoes or shirt or toys, or books), went home. Until the last gift bought at the store was wrapped and crowned with a colored ribbon bow that I’d helped make back in the summer (back before you could buy prepared bows with stickum on the reverse.) I remember the other merchants in those last days, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, smiling as they left the stores, locked the doors, and went home.
It all seemed simple and peaceful, those late Christmas Eve nights, and early Christmas mornings, when I woke early and found that “Santa” had decorated the tree overnight and there were candy canes in the stockings, and would wake my exhausted mother up early to tell her. But of course it was no simpler then than now…my child’s understanding was the simple part. In those years, after WWII, war was still being waged one place and another: Peace on Earth was a long way away, though we didn’t have a TV to bring it into the living room. Tidings of Comfort and Joy mingled on the radio with tidings of danger, disaster, threats of nuclear war, threats of blizzards, forest fires, earthquakes, and everything else.
We’re still in that same old sucking mudhole, with the fresh air and beauty above, and the sense of depthless stinking filth below: we live on the unstable surface of reality, rising with bubbles and sinking when they burst. And it’s Christmas in a year when a lot of us feel the pandemic, on top of the stinking mess still being created by this Administration is way over the top too much. Not much Ho, Ho, Ho and Holly Jolly Santa, not enough Heavenly Peace and Tidings of Comfort, either. Plus no choirs, no trumpets lifting the packed-in congregation at the midnight service into “O Come All Ye Faithful” and sending it away with “Joy to the World.”
And yet…above us, on a winter’s night, despite clouds, far beyond our satellites and the ISS, the stars still shine in their beauty. On the twig tips of leafless trees and shrubs, buds hold promise of another spring to come. In central Texas, below the dead summer grass, the winter grasses are greening up a little and a few tiny lavender flowers were out yesterday. Flocks of robins and cedar waxwings make the mornings musical (or at least loud.) The horses, furry in their winter coats (one of them with mud-lumps in his mane) munch contentedly on their extra hay.
Take a breath. And another. Yes, we have difficulties before us, but right now, take that breath, that moment to realize that there is a universe full of wonder outside us…and in each and every human mind and heart. Be merry, just for a moment. Be at peace, just for a moment. Have that comfort and joy, just for this brief time before you have to step away.
