Christmas Season Story

It is now one week before Thanksgiving and since that week will fly by so fast I will just get on with Christmas.

It is now the night before Thanksgiving and all the preparations are being made. Anita is working. Anita is doing much of the cooking today so that tomorrow will be easier. I wish I could help her as I once did but that is not possible anymore. I can write this and I will do just that.

We washed the Scotties today so that they would be clean for the holiday. They are easy to wash and don’t mind a warm shower and a warm rinse. They are easier to have around when they are clean, as most of us are. I took a shower as well. No sense in wasting a good chance. They must be clean when they start begging for turkey and such.

It is now black Saturday and I am getting ready for the last lsu game. Lower case letters for "LSU" are mandatory since they have being playing in lower case all season. In any event is will be finished later tonight and the uproar can start for next season. It will give a lot of people something to do.

I am now in the walking stage of my life. The hurry and run phase is over. Yet when Christmas comes around I remember when I was jogging every day and how I loved to jog after dark starting with Thanksgiving evening. That is when many turned on their outside Christmas lights. I loved to jog those miles enjoying the light. I enjoyed that immensely and I think about it every time when the lights go on. I have a great memory for that time and I will jog around this year in my mind and have the season of lights talk to me in those fine memories.

Another reason I like this time of year is tied to the movie A Christmas Story. That is the movie that is played on one of the cable stations. It has become a classic and most of the country likes it. I like it because of the memories it brings back about my own young Christmas celebrations. Ralph is the character that pursues his definition of the perfect gift to look forward to being under the tree on that certain morning. It is the Holy Grail of Christmas gifts, the Red Ryder BB gun with the compass in the stock. I remember that gun clearly because one showed up on a Christmas morning when I was hoping Santa would come through.

The movie is a real reminder of the anticipation and effort in pursuing Ralph's fantasy gift. He encounters all kinds of obstacles in his quest but he continues to pursue with undaunted courage. I can remember getting that Red Ryder rifle and spending that afternoon outside getting in some practice for upcoming adventures. What good memories that recalls for me. I still love the magic of Christmas.

The story comes from a book entitled In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash. It is a reminder of the early holiday times in my life and all the youthful energy and enthusiasm that went with them. I hope you have such memories in your memory bank.

Christmas also comes with a little chaos and havoc associated with it. A little controlled pandemonium is always appreciated because it keeps the energy flowing. We enjoy this up to a point; when that pandemonium starts to overflow into areas that we would not like to have it occur, then things don’t seem so enjoyable anymore.

If these disturbances start to upset norms and values that are very important to us and the way we live daily, then they become quite troublesome in the unease they bring with them. When this occurs it can bring abut some painful times. I can remember when one of my major beliefs was taken down. I was in the third grade and was beginning to get really excited about Santa and his Christmas Eve visitation. It was my two neighbor girls who took it upon themselves to tell me the truth about Santa. They couldn’t believe that I thought there was a Santa. Didn’t I know that Santa’s name was mom and dad? I couldn’t believe it; the world. Especially kids couldn’t make it without Santa. How would the world make it without a Santa and how would Christmas make it without a Santa to pair up with Christ? Don’t take Christ out of Christmas and don’t take Santa out either. I can still work myself up about it after all these years; those dream busters were two mean little girls.

And every now and then life brings to us an event that is so upsetting and disturbing that we need some help in dealing with it.
Sometimes things happen to us that absolutely require that we get in touch with everything we believe just in order to survive. It reaches down and shakes the very core of who we are and the beliefs that hold us together. The foundations shake so hard that you wonder if they will collapse. And I found out that I had to rethink values, beliefs, norms, faith, and ideas. Such an event can happen and it did happen to me and is still happening.

I found out that I couldn’t handle it. I tried but I didn’t handle it very well at all. It gored me like some Spanish bull in some bullring and continued to thrust its horns at me, as I lay wounded in the ring. As I lay there blind, that blindness impacted everything I believed. This was the most radical experience in my life. And immediately the question came asking me what was I supposed to do with an experience like this. There was no warning, no precedent, no good analogy to use, no previous experience to compare it to. I couldn’t say well, this is sort of like that thing that happened to me back when. There was this blindness of mine forced me to go back and find out what my core beliefs really are.

I had to revisit, reexamine, review and renew my life up to this point. It forced me to go back and see just how tough I was and am in the face of things not going just as I wish. And I found that difficult to do and I also found it frightening. This new experience wasn’t impacting my future nearly as much as it seemed to impact my past. My past and the faith part of my past is all that I have. My past got me here and now something has happened that calls a number of ideal and faith factors into question. I could not throw away that past; I had to rethink it.

What does this blindness mean in light of faith? What does this new experience mean and what am I supposed to do with it? This has no easy answer and the real answer has to be worked through late at night when I am the only one awake. And I find that I must work it out over and over and over again. And faith says or God says or Christ says that what has happened does have some continuity with God and faith.

God speaks in the darkness saying that he is there and I am not alone. And there is a distinct possibility that I can endure. And it just may be that my accumulated past that I think is threatened by this new experience is the past that has prepared me to meet this new situation. God somehow finds a way to tell me to go back and work this through again and in that working through I will find is the past that has brought me to this moment and will get me through it. And Christ comes to us and says, “Remember all the things that I have told you; remember and hold on to them and never doubt that I will hold on to you.”