Season's Greetings

Thoughts about the holiday season. If you so choose, please pull up this campfire to sit by:

From Stuart:

I enter the season with lots of ideas and hope. I will write Christmas cards. I will decorate the house. I will get a tree and garlands and wreaths and flowers and candles to make the inside cozy. I will get those electric candles with the white bulbs (not orange) to put in the windows. There will be a nativity. And I will put those decorations up by the first Sunday in Advent and keep them out until the last day of the Christmas season in early January. 

There will be an Advent wreath and I will light the candles on the appropriate days and say my prayers. I will display thoughtfully every Christmas card we receive and treat the cards as if the people themselves were visiting, reminders that we care and are cared about, a shorthand way of being with family from so many hours away. And I will get the fireplace fixed so it can be magical. 

Wren is more practical. When are we going to buy presents? What are we going to eat? No, you can't light those Advent candles because they release too much smoke. And the Christmas cards … we don't even talk to most of those people anymore and this is the only time we hear from them. At least we don't pretend by sending them cards, do we? You didn't send them a card, did you? You did. 

She says I’m on my own when it comes to decorating the outside of the house because who has the time and just why. But I never make it to the store to get what we need, not even the electric candles, so we don't decorate. I never have the time. Or I’m just lazy.

From Felix:

I put my Christmas cards in a pile in a bowl under the coffee table. There, but not there. And when the decorations go away, the cards go in the shredder. I mean, it's a privacy issue. You can't just throw them out because people have their names, addresses, pictures of their kids. So, blessings, joy, love, and peace are fed into the grinding metal teeth, a winter wonderland of paper snow in the trash can. 

Another thing about Christmas is how it brings family front and center, raises your damaged inner child, and undoes months of therapy so you have a fresh start in the new year. 

From Jude:

Growing up we had a red candle placed in a plastic wreath of faux pine and holly. My last memory of it is an image of tall, thin, burned-through walls of wax surrounding a smoke-stained white cavern deep inside. You needed extra-long matches to light it. Either that or the small matches, where you'd risk your fingertips. That was how I learned that heat always rises and you need to pick up the candle and tilt it on its side to light it. Flames travel very quickly up an inverted matchstick.

I used to love watching the tall walls that remained, seeing them bend inward, folding toward the heat and the red outer wax running in trickles down the inside to be burned in a pool at the bottom. Sometimes I would push the tops of the walls in to accelerate its decline and watch it drip.

I remember a cold, dark Christmas Eve, walking toward the corner where our neighborhood church stood. Bitter cold, but dark, deep blue sky and so many stars as the lights of Philadelphia allowed us to see. I remember the candles in the church, lit in memory of someone, white candles in red glass. I always wondered why someone didn't simply light them all. 

I loved watching them shine their amber light up to the Virgin Mary, the soft, warm glow and unpredictable shadows cast by spontaneous flickers giving the appearance of movement, like she was there.

I always enjoyed candlelight. It invites silence, prayer, reflection, and comfort. The church says candles remind us of the divine presence, the presence that is the light of the world. The scriptures say we should not cover that light, but leave it uncovered to share that light with others; to be like a city on the hill, a beacon for others who are lost in the dark. 

From Ian:

I wonder how Christmas feels south of the equator? The whole mystique must be different. 

In Dubai, I bought Christmas postcards depicting colored lights and camels wearing Santa hats. Do they still ship in evergreen trees? Does all the decor have green and red and snow? 

I remember lighted plastic snowmen in San Diego and no one out there has ever seen snow in their life. I always thought that odd.

In 2009 while deployed on Midway on Christmas Eve, Krampus brought me a Class Charlie fire in one-alpha steam plant control system transformer. What the hell.

From Tristan:

The magic peaks in times around the sun’s rise and set, when long shadows streak through gold, and the vibrant edge of land and sky fades to stars. The dark brings cold and craving for heat. The light brings business and tasks and chores. The in-between times bring silence of transition where we may be able to hear or feel the soft voice or touch, imperceptible otherwise.

In Advent, days shorten to the longest nights, then Christmas brings back the lengthening days that accelerate through Easter to June.

Everything has an in-between time. Always moving from one thing to another we lose them. Attend to the in-betweens.

Neither starts nor stops, life is constant unfolding, everything not so much in between as on the move, and to be with it, moving with it, in flow, is a kind of magic. Life itself is in-between unknowing and unknowing, a cosmic blink of awareness.

The darkness surrounds us but here there is light. Here there is hope. 

This is a work of fiction based on actual events.

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