Warning: A Christmas Message
Political correctness? Humbug! Next week IS Christmas according to the calendar. Here’s a Christmas message I wrote in 2001, never dreaming that the reference to war would still apply today. Let there be peace on earth, and may there be peace in YOUR world today. (And if you celebrate Christmas, I wish you a merry one, indeed!)
Something New For Christmas
I hauled Christmas out from the furnace room – the same boxes I’ve packed and unpacked,
holding the same decorations for the coffee table, mantle and piano, and the same ornaments for the same kind of tree, year after year after year. It all looked as tired as I felt.
I put on Christmas music to try to get in the spirit of things. The familiar tunes rang hollow. Christmas – the season to be jolly, my unrivaled favorite as holidays go – felt wooden. What was wrong with me? Why these “holiday blues”?
Was I longing for the good old Christmases of my childhood, with aunts and uncles singing carols around the piano at Grandpa’s house? Was I missing my father, my brother-in-law, and the others who’ve been gone so many, many years? Was I wanting my sister’s oyster chowder, and yesterday’s little ones, eyes wide with Santa wonder? Was I missing my own children, grown now and spread across the country? The grandchildren? Was September 11th casting this dreary pall across my Christmas? Was I wishing for a reprieve from war, from worry?
“Lord,” I prayed, “Show me something new this year…”
In the last box, I uncovered my small collection of Christmas books. The pages of Norman 
Rockwell’s Christmas Book are a visual feast, illustrating poems, songs, and stories of the season. I chuckled as usual reading Ogden Nash’s poem, “The Boy Who Laughed at Santa Claus,” about a dreadful boy who gets his comeuppance from Saint Nicholas himself, who turns the rotten, mouthy kid into a jack-in-the-box. The boy meets his well-deserved end in the last lines:
“The saucy boy who told the saint off / The child who got him, licked his paint off.” Now that’s good writing!
Anticipation stirred at the sight of two paperbacks that are my annual December reads. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (by Barbara Robinson) always makes me cry when I read about raggedy little Gladys Herdman as the Angel of the Lord “with her skinny legs and her dirty sneakers sticking out from under her robe, yelling at all of us, everywhere: ‘Hey! Unto you a child is born!’”
And in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, dead Marley’s lament haunts me. “Mankind was my business… charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business,” he’s realized too late. But Scrooge’s redemption gives me hope.
It’s not too late for me, for any of us.
The best I uncovered last. Once Upon a Christmas: A Treasury of Memories is a collection of poems and stories by several great Christian writers. The book’s preface promised to show me “Christmas in all its royal splendor, told afresh with wondering, wandering joy…”It fulfilled that promise, ending with an answer to my prayer in this poem by Calvin Miller, written over a decade ago but timed perfectly for “all of us, everywhere”:
Once in every universe
Some world is worry-torn
And hungry for a global lullaby.
O rest, poor race, and hurtle on through space–
God has umbilicated Himself to straw,
Laid by His thunderbolts and learned to cry.
May God sing you a lullaby, soothe your worry-torn world, and feed your hungry soul. May He show you something new this Christmas.
