CHRISTMAS 2014

                                                           

                                                                                               

CHRISTMAS 2014

Somehow, I think it’s getting a little harder for me to write about Christmas each year. Sometimes I’m not always sure what were talking about, when we talk about Christmas. I know the true meaning and why-- but I think it’s evolving to a point where the birth of Christ, will just be an after-thought, lost in the crush of Holiday parties and mad gift giving. It’s like celebrating your own birthday with a lavish party but no one ever gives you birthday wishes-- they just say-- “what a party huh?” So you say, “This is a free country and you’re able to celebrate anyway you want to,” and you know what? Your right and I have no problem with that. My problem comes when you call it a Christmas Holiday and yet have no intention of recognizing Christ’s birth as the reason for the holiday.

            But in the true spirit of Christmas, I must get beyond this and not let others spoil my Christmas. If I’m to be a scrooge, then I only add to my dissatisfaction. It seems ironic but the Christmas’s that stir my soul the most are the ones when I was so poor and not the opulent ones that came later in life. Maybe it was because those poor Christmas’s came with a huge measure of sacrifice from my parents and others and sacrifice is so often, synonymous with love. How easy it would have been for them to say, “Let’s just skip the whole thing.” However they didn’t do that because they knew if I was to see the real meaning of Christmas, then it had to happen. They knew as a child, maybe I wouldn’t understand their sacrifices but they also knew that there would come a day when I would-- and believe me it is here and now. Meager or not it wasn’t meant to be about gifts; they were just an afterthought. It was really about Jesus’ birth and us. Dr Seuss said in ‘How the Grinch stole Christmas.’ “Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. What if Christmas he thought, doesn’t come from a store? What if Christmas—perhaps-- means a little bit more.”

            Christmas for me evokes so many memories. I look at pictures from Christmas’s past and although those sometimes-grainy photos are really just moments frozen in time, the stories they tell are still so real, so fluid. For me at least they are truly a hallmark moment. Nostalgia-- at least for me-- brings comfort and hope from the past and that enriches my present and helps me to make what is happening in my life today, okay and more bearable.  If Christmas still weren’t important to me anymore-- then I wouldn’t be writing this, would I?

            So its Christmas 2014 and I really hope that it’s one that you will never forget. That one of the reasons will be because little boys and girls will have a dream or two come true from under your Christmas tree and you will be the happy giver. That somewhere in a house of worship, you will sing Silent Night and remember the reason for the season. That someone you love will blow you a kiss from across the room or snuggle with you in the corner of the couch in front of a fire and it will all be so perfect and someday sixty years from now, those same little kids will look at a picture from that very night and say. “That was the best Christmas ever.

CHRISTMAS 1950

Growing up in the fifties there was no such thing as an artificial Christmas tree. I don’t even remember a Christmas tree lot in my hometown but they were popular in the big city, I guess. My father, on this particular holiday, of which I speak, borrowed a page out of “Chevy Chase’s Christmas Vacation,” although the script was yet to be written for many years. I had to keep telling him. “My name is Mike, not Rusty,” but maybe that was just a coincidence.

So a couple of weeks before Christmas, dad, mom and all eight of us kids would pile into the old family sedan and we would wander the countryside, looking for the perfect Christmas tree. Dad’s philosophy was that any land that didn’t have a fence around it was public domain and the trees were there for the taking. In fact, it was an honor for any tree to be chosen as a Christmas tree and he would mutter something about those rights granted to us by our forefathers in the constitution. I was never able to quite figure out—if, what he said was true-- why did one of us kid’s always have to be a lookout-- and how come, what should have been a fun family event, always turned into a snatch and grab. There was no time for measurements either, as Dads reasoning was, we could always make the tree fit the room. Myself, sitting in the back seat of the car that day could not help but notice that Mom and Dad had a remarkable resemblance to Bonnie and Clyde.

On this particular year of, which I speak, the tree we brought home, tied to the roof of the old Plymouth, could have decorated Rockefeller Square. Most of the treetop was gone by the time we got home, being drug down the highway behind the car. The rest broke off while the tree was being squeezed through the front door, which I can only describe as trying to push a corncob into a Pepsi bottle. Because the base was ten inches in diameter we dispensed with the inadequate tree stand and put it in a washtub. The top of the tree-- after trimming-- had a similar size diameter as the bottom, so the angel that was supposed to be perched up there, alone on a spindle, had a virtual stage for itself, Rudolf, Santa, G.I. Joe and a Raggedy Ann doll.

The girth of the tree took so many lights to adequately light it, that we were only allowed to turn them on for a few minutes each night and then only after unplugging every other electrical appliance in the house. I personally witnessed the lights in the neighbor’s house dimming and the streetlight in the alley going out when dad plugged the tree in. Also because the living room was not that big, most of the family had to sit in the dining room when we gathered around the tree. Dad seemed to be especially proud that year because we heated with wood and he was heard to say after Christmas, “There was a quarter cord of wood in that Christmas Tree.” Yes Virginia, my family was one of the original recyclers. So with those fond memories of Christmas past in mind, this year I decided to go cut a tree myself and get back into the spirit my father tried to instill in all of us. My neighbor has so many spruce trees she won’t miss one but if she does, I have my story already concocted. I will tell her it was an old man in a 36 Plymouth with a whole raft of kids and he went that way and no she cannot come see my Christmas tree.

WISHES

                                                            

If you had one wish, what would you wish for and don’t tell me you would wish for more wishes. I have asked myself that question so many times but always the answers were not forth coming. Maybe its because I am a realist and had little faith it would happen and likened it to the old English proverb that said,” If wishes were horses beggars would ride, if turnips were watches, I’d wear one by my side,” That little ditty doesn’t make much sense but it does show the folly of trying to get something for nothing. Even to win the lotto you have to buy a ticket. To those who believe in a higher power, even asking for divine intervention, takes some effort on your part. You have to at least ask and practice a little faith.

I guess before we formulate a bucket list of wishes, we have to ask ourselves what is really important in this world and what isn’t and what is really possible? I used to wish and pray a lot for world peace. But then reality bit me in the butt and I grew to realize that in all of the annals of history in this world, there has never been world peace and there never will be. That somewhere, somehow, what we perceive as an evil person is trying to inflict power over some lesser members of society. There is an old Christian hymn that begins with,” Let there be peace on earth and let it began with me.” I have grown to realize that is probably all I can hope to accomplish in my lifetime when it comes to peace and believe me there are days I struggle with even that but in the end-- I am the one, I am trying to please. Maybe my wish should simply be that I could live in peace with myself.

I could wish for riches but what good would more riches do me? When I look at the world around me and all of the struggles taking place out there personally, and amongst family and friends, I realize how blest I have been. I know now, that had being rich, been one of the most important things in my life, I probably would have been rich. All to often there is a price to pay with being rich. A price that would have gone against many of the things I believe in. My late wife taught me a great lesson in life. For you see, she was a very private person who led by example. She worked hard always and loved hard too. In the end, she didn’t take to the grave with her, ideals that money can’t buy but left them to keep on giving every day in her family and friends. Maybe my wishes should be for things that I can personally make happen because that’s how wishes come true. If wishes just magically appeared to all who wished for them-- who in the world would not have all they ever wanted?

I have always thought that unless you are soliciting someone for something, like kids do at Christmas time, then your wishes are probably more like prayers. If you’re not directing your wish to any one person here on earth—then I ask-- who’s left? On the other hand, to have some celestial power grant you all of your wishes is to take away your self made dreams and ambitions. Life is much more worth living when you have goals you want to achieve and celebrations you want to have and you get there by yourself. That’s called self-satisfaction.

Now if your wish is for me to shut up. Then I will—There, you got your wish.

WATER

There is something mystical about a body of water that can appear so peaceful sometimes, yet turn into something so menacing at other times.  Have you ever watched, on a peaceful summer night when that crimson sun is setting low over the lake, down at that place where the sky, sun and water seem to simply melt together? It seems to be an only fitting and proper ending, capping off another perfect summer day. It is so conclusive and you almost expect that at some point, when and where they meet, for sky, sun and sea to whirl around and blend together—like those tiny glass pieces and beads in the end of a kaleidoscope—forming a spellbinding picture and a brief parting encore to the day, and then quietly fading away into a starlit night.

Then there are the days when the gray clouds seem to roll and churn out of a cold angry wind. Together, they make the water heave and boil in some kind of grim, macabre partnership, and the waves seem to stretch and reach out with white watery tentacles from the greenish black depths of the lake, grasping for a chance to tear away at anything that gets in its way. It pounds the shoreline in relentless fury, trying to devour the very land that holds it in and somehow seems to be the only thing impeding its forward progress.

Yes, water can make quite an impression. Without it, you’re dead in three days, and all the creatures on the face of the earth would not survive. We clean ourselves with it, we journey to other lands on it, and we use it as a gigantic moat to protect our shores from intruders. It evaporates and then comes again as rain to grow our crops and cleanse the earth. It’s the gentle tinkling of ice against glass that ushers in an afternoon cocktail. It’s the snow in the mountains that feeds the rivers—that feed the desert valleys and makes them bloom. Without it there would be no waterfalls, no rainbows, “Where bluebirds fly.” No “Up the lazy river by the old mill run.” No “Dan and I with throats burned dry and souls that cry for water.”

Every drop of water that was on this earth a million years ago is still with us. It has been used over and over again. It has been evaporated, condensed and rained. It has been boiled away, condensed and rained. It has been sweated, condensed and rained. The tears that were spilled from the cheeks of a child in Kenya can, theoretically, come back as raindrops over India a few days later, or lie deep in an aquifer for centuries before coming out of some spring. It has been frozen for ten thousand years, melted and drank, and yes, it’s been consumed by animals and peed back out onto the earth in the greatest recycling effort that has ever existed.

But there has been a change. Mother Nature has, for years, been the filtering device that cleans and recycles our water. She has taken muddy rivers water, full of debris, and brought it back from the bowels of the earth sparkling clear, cool and refreshing. But then man, in his infinite wisdom to control the growth of crops and reduce the insects that eat them, and the weeds that crowd them out, has introduced chemicals that can no longer be filtered out and now we get to wash with it, and drink it. Just something else we have left our kids and grandkids.