In my earlier, more pious life, I often got my knickers in a twist fuming about the commercialization of Christmas. “Santa has replaced the manger child! Ain’t it a shame?” Grumble, grumble, grumble! The issue has not gotten any simpler. The whiskered man in the red suit has increasingly dominated the season--until this year when the VIRUS reduced the commercial scene to Internet catalogues and zoom.
But in recent years important changes have been taking place in me. I am devoted to the story of the manger child. And while for years I have tended to avoid hectic shopping sprees, I now spend more time and energy listening to those I encounter as they talk about their childhood memories, family gatherings, the empty place at the Christmas table, and ways they plan to do something for people they don’t even know.
On Thanksgiving I produced a column about Grandmother’s Turkey. I subsequently got a call from daughter Beth in New Orleans who was not about to have her Great-Granny get the best of her. On Thanksgiving she had cooked THREE turkeys: one for dinner to share with friends, a second to be a base for gallons of jambalaya taken to the community food locker to be used by any family needing the nourishment, a third as part of scores of dinners she distributed in a hard-hit part of the city. That’s just Beth’s nature!
Some to whom I listen found themselves in church, even if services had now arrived electronically. Even so, there is also something compelling about the colored lights reflected in the eyes of children, the decorated houses, the north pole scenes depicting Santa’s workshop, and even the plastic snowmen silently performing their sentry duties on neighborhood lawns.
Some people sing out “Merry Christmas” to friends and strangers alike. Others say “Happy Holidays,” but it is often the same message. “No matter who you are, we are neighbors on this troubled planet, and at least for this short time, we have each other.”
Sometime over the years most of us have probably either seen a production or listened to a reading of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” and may even have taken pity on Ebenezer Scrooge with his dismal “humbug.” And if we run across someone who sneers at the season because they think it is too religious or not religious enough, we will smile and perhaps recall the words of Scrooge’s nephew when confronting his grumpy uncle.
“Humbug uncle? I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come around –apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”
And finally we will remember the words of Tiny Tim, who was making a profound theological statement, and also offering a heart-warming song of love to anyone with ears to hear, and to all those whose hearts may have been softened by the season, when he said, “God bless us, Every One!”
So whoever you are and wherever you find yourself in life’s journey, my word to you echoes that sentiment, and so I also say, “God bless Us, Every One!”-- AND HAPPY NEW YEAR.
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