Merry Christmas to All

Merry Christmas to all of you, and may your new year bring you continuing hope, love, and blessings.

I write this message early Christmas morning. Tracy, Shahra, and David and Kay (Tracy's parents who suffered long delays in Chicago's O'Hare International airport to share this holiday with us) are fast asleep. Meanwhile, I sit writing, sated and in a sublime stupor from last night's sugar-filled dainties and spicy meats and cheeses. In my bedroom lay a couple stunning dress shirt/tie combinations, a couple of lovely and trendy sweaters, a couple book I know I will enjoy reading. The gifts are wonderfully generous and thoughtful, and I appreciate my family for them. But, this Christmas morning, my thoughts go, not to gifts, but to fatherhood, family, and Christmases long ago.

Soon Shahra will awaken. We will tell her about Santa's midnight visit, anticipating her reaction to a coterie of toys that should make her squeal and giggle in delight. Our eyes will be on her, even as she fails to recognize the tradition we are creating for her benefit. In this morning reverie, I think about my own Christmas mornings.

For me, those Christmas Eve night's long ago were a fight with my eyelids for daylight, the earliest glimpses of morning that might justify my approach to a Christmas tree laden with those special gifts from Santa. My nights were virtually sleepless and I shivered with anticipation and childish ecstasy as I plotted up stairs or across a hallway in footed pajamas, creeping, peering around a corner through dim Christmas tree lighting, trying to discern with tired, weak eyes whether Santa had arrived or whether I should make a mad dash back to bed lest I scare him off.

Yet after all these years, there's only one Christmas morning I distinctly remember. I was five or six, and I received a He-Man action figure playset called Castle Grayskull, fully assembled and waiting for me in front of the Christmas tree, beckoning me to grab my other action figures and play, play throughout the Christmas morning. For all my youthful excitement, though, I grew out of this toy; I don't even know what has happened to it. I doubt many of you even remember what He-Man, let alone Castle Grayskull, is--if, of course, you ever did know.

This memory makes me a bit somber. Not for a longing to feel that childhood innocence again, not from a sense that those misremembered Christmases of long ago can never be reclaimed, but because for all that glorious ecstacy I felt as a child I realize now that, for me in my youth, those memories were about the gifts. I cannot glaze them with a sugary coating of childhood innocence or dress them in evergreen trimmings of family gatherings. I longed, throughout the Christmas season, for the gifts. Many nights in the month of December, I dreamed about what I would get. I wrangled and wriggled all of Christmas Eve, grumbled as I dressed for church, urged brevity in others speeches, dismayed at long dinner table conversations, hurriedly gobbled my food, held the seat of my chair, waiting for when the crowd would move to the living room and we'd open those Christmas Eve gifts to one another. Then I'd wait in anticiptation for Christmas morning.

It's not that I expect too much from the childhood me. As children, we were all egocentric, too concerned with ourselves, never looking too much outward, except for approval. All I know is that, in the past, it was about the presents and that, now, it isn't.

Now, in my Christmas Eves, I prefer to linger. At church, I sit anticipating, not splendid wrapped gifts, but an epiphanic moment, as I think of Christ's birth in a manger through chant and song that carries my voice and the voices of others up, up, throughout the sanctuary and, I hope, out the church doors to the souls of some others. That night, at home, I linger over the good food and good company, not really concerned about what I will open or whether I will open much of anything at all. Instead, I consider how I will build in traditions, how I will contribute to make the experience richer for us all, thinking about what traditions of my past I should carry forth to my family, figuring out what should go in the child's stocking or whether, this year, we should read together the Christmas story in the book of Luke. I think about how to delay the gifting, just a little bit, to weave a rich fabric of family togetherness before the material revelry. This morning, I will glory in seeing my child's ecstatic, gleeful smile.

When does the heart open up? When do we, as adults, shed that childish, egocentric mindset and begin to think more of others than we do of ourselves? I certainly cannot mark a Christmas in my past where my mind went from selfishness to generosity. I imagine my heart opened slowly, after several long ago Christmases. And I antipicate, quite ecstatically, that it will keep opening, for as much as I cherish my memories of past Christmases, I love the Christmas present ever more.

Merry Christmas to you all. Today, may you be surrounded with family love and generosity that will highlight the bright moments of your year and carry you through the dark ones, until next Christmas.

Amen.