Christmas Eve

>

Stella. Christmas 2008.

It is the day before Christmas (2009), and I am shopping, absorbed in the more pragmatic war associated with Christmas, you know, fighting with a young woman in an SUV, over an available parking space. I was distracted because I saw Santa step out of a parked Ford Taurus. That’s fine, maybe it’s a buy-American Christmas Message. But I couldn’t help but think about the trickle down relative to reindeer unemployment. Santa waved, and wished me a Merry Christmas, and it made me smile and I felt warm on the inside. “Thank you,” I shouted out my window. “Nice sled, by the way.” And while I was distracted, the woman in the SUV seized MY parking space. But that’s okay. I was still in an uncharacteristic good mood. It’s not often you get to see Santa drive a Ford.
On the ferry, crossing the Puget Sound this morning, the Olympic Mountains stood, vivid, snow mantled, substantial and reassuring in their grandeur. I snapped a picture with my cell phone, and took a deep breath, and allowed the moment to be my prayer. Earlier this morning I worked in my garden. We don’t have a farm, but it is certainly a garden far to big for my ability to tend it. That doesn’t concern me like it used to. Tidiness is not really a virtue in a great garden. Anyone who says so is hankering for a photo opportunity, and not a garden. This morning I cut spent stalks of Rudbeckia, Miscanthus, Buddleia, Astrantia and Aster. They are all bundled (it makes me feel like a character in a Winslow Homer painting), and hauled to the compost heap. Each part of this annual ritual is visceral and gratifying, and helps our economy by boosting the sales of BenGay.
Back to my shopping mission. I know it’s late, but for me, deadline means time to get started. I pass a home that may win the excessive-ornamentation-rewriting -of-history-contest. There is a nativity scene–Mary, Joseph and Jesus (each character of the plastic blow-up variety, and wrapped in lights.). Requisite animals (there is one cow, one sheep and one donkey), and one lone shepherd. Three wise men and their camels flank the manger. Nearby, Santa has landed on the lawn pulled by only five reindeer. And just beyond the creche stands Mickey Mouse, a clown unfamiliar to me and a snowman smoking a pipe. They are dancing with two angels. The entire scene is surrounded by five-foot candy canes. Someone, it all made sense to me. If I had a Christmas wish it would be this: let us set aside our need for theological purity, and quit haranguing one another just because our greetings and well-wishes contain the word holiday instead of Christmas (we end up looking like two irate shoppers fighting for a parking space). Here’s the deal: Unto us a child is born. And the power of that simple sentence means that the season of peace and good will toward all, will transcend any of the petty ways we muck it up, with our language, or “inadequate” belief systems. And the seed planted in every heart by the in-flesh-ment of God on earth, well, that’s the kind of thing that spreads peace and light and dollops of Grace in a world that can desperately use it. So peace to each and every one of us. On this silent, holy night. I’ll leave the singing to Sarah McLachlan.
Enjoy. And pass it on.