Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, to you and yours, from me and mine.

If this isn’t your holiday, I apologize for the wording of the salutation but not the sentiment. As I've gotten older, I've learned there are many marvelous customs and beliefs this time of year, and I think we are the better for having and enjoying as many of them as we can.

I've spent a lot of this year trying to be my best me and realizing I’m falling short while also accepting I'm rounding the clubhouse turn, so I'm grateful for a wonderful woman for over forty-two years of marriage who promised to love me. Life is very much what happens when you're busy making other plans.

I'm filled with gratitude beyond words for the present of the presence of our two children. The adults they have each grown to be are as wonderful and extraordinary as the children who blessed my life when I so needed those blessings. Both of them have lives and loves of their own with whom to share as the next chapters in their stories continue to unfold. And happiness I would hope is a large part of their lives today.

I’ve often read that we are a society too busy spending money we don’t have to acquire things we don’t want to impress people we don’t like. That’s why today however you celebrate Christmas, I’d hope we can be grateful that if we have family and friends, we have everything we need.  

All of us know one or more people who are packing for, or unpacking from, journeys near and far but mostly to and from someplace they call home. And speaking of which my wife as always completed her checklist making sure everything was ready for Christmas in a home that blends German traditions and American ones to create something all its own and with which she and I are perfectly comfortable after so many Christmases together.

Sigrid, as always, did all the decorating inside and out, enlisting our daughter as a consultant and helper while I tried (mostly successfully) to stay out of her way as strings of light and garland and tinsel transformed that artificial pine tree in the living room into so much bright and beautiful.

Maybe this year we'll again post pictures to social media as billions of fellow travelers on the Big Blue Marble do every year so that people we know, and others we don't but think we do, can share in something we all believe we understand when its actual meaning is purely personal and deeply private.

I've been told a friend is a present you give to yourself and that there's no such things as strangers, only friends we haven't met. If both of those statements are true, and it is, after all, Christmas, when everything and anything can and does happen, then I hope you’ll agree to accept and celebrate that when we have given each other the best of ourselves, it’s the most perfect present possible.

And in that spirit, Merry Christmas.

-bill kenny