Christmas Presence

  I am not getting used to it being dark in the afternoon. The light is giving up too soon. It’s ceding territory like it doesn’t care. Night is too insistent and day isn’t up for the fight. A couple more weeks of this until the tide turns. This is the way things end every year, with a belief that it can only get better. It will get light again. There is a new beginning on offer. Advent. Hope. Waiting. I am wondering if all the lights and energy around the pending holiday distract from the opportunity to let the dark be dark, and the quiet be quiet. Might all the noise blur the true contrast of now and then. I’ve wrestled with Christmas over the years. I think much of it comes from having expectations rather than anticipation. I have already decided, with the help of the standard narrative, what it should be like and feel like. I have set the bar, and am most disappointed when it doesn’t come close to reaching it, which it rarely, if ever, has. I already know the end of the story. ...

 It all began the Christmas that Ben was nine. He put a little too much tape on his brother’s present. “What did you do to this thing?” Miles complained. “Encase it in concrete? Here—you take it.” With a flick of the wrist Miles winged the present straight at Ben, crashing it against the wall behind him.  “Boys, boys!” yelled mom. “It’s Christmas.”  But it was no use. Miles and Ben were already rolling around on the floor in a lethal embrace, and their Christmas present that year was getting sent to their rooms. The next Christmas, Miles hadn’t forgotten about the over-wrapped present. He swaddled Ben’s gift in as much packing tape as he could get his hands on—making it look like a solid mass of congealed glue. Ben had to take it to the basement and saw it open.  After that, the Christmas present thing became a kind of game. Ben put Myles’ next present inside a wooden box and screwed it shut, then tied the whole thing with pretty ribbons of barbed wire.  The fol...

  I find it galling that each and every blessed year when Christmas is glimpsed on the distant horizon, killjoy Christians start trying to instill guilt about a fundamental, sacramental part of the celebration of Jesus' coming - the giving of gifts.  It's a birthday party, for God's sake!  You bring presents!   The wise men knew it, and behaved accordingly.  Children know it, and glory in it - and except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter in.  George Bailey's neighbours knew it, and brought all they could spare.  To heck with the unreformed Scrooges of the world and their workhouses and poor laws, skipping Christmas parties and turning the portly gentlemen from their doors!  To heck with the Grinches of the world, stealing the presents from all the Whos down in Whoville! Tell those humbuggers it's the heart of the bleak midwinter, and if we want to cheer the people we love by bringing them gold, or frankincence, or myrrh, or Tickle M...