Very Nearly Merry Christmas

I know your list of holiday errands and chores is so long you don’t have the time to let me wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy Holiday. I don’t take it personally.

In much the same manner as a rabbit who distributes chocolate eggs replaced the original meaning of Easter, we've grown old in a culture that has a Jolly Old Elf flying around the world in one night handing out presents that look just like the stuff you once bought for the kids in that store with the giraffe. Funny how art imitates life and then doesn't.

I'm a fossil who grew up in Fifties when we had air raid warnings that involved hiding under our school desks and facing away from the windows (to avoid the flash of atomic incineration), three (if we had a good antenna) TV stations, all black and white all the time, fathers who got up early and went far away to work and moms who made sure we got to school, came home, put on play clothes before we went outside (every time I see trousers at half-mast or tattered-knee jeans, I imagine the reaction of my mother or, more especially, my father, and smile), had dinner, did our homework and got ready for bed when we'd get up and do it all again.

Ours was a nuclear family--now many of us live in an unclear society where anything goes, and nobody knows. Back in the day, I had Sister Rose, Sister Thomas Anne, and Sister Mary Jean, and this time of year, our heads were not filled with thoughts of sugar plum fairies (never did get that line or what they were supposed to be. Fruit cake, I've had; sugar plums, not quite), but we were experts on The Nativity Scene (I felt compelled to capitalize the "T" because I was taught NO other way to write it).

We learned all the hymns, often in what Sister Mary Jean called 'the original Latin' which I realized years later was a private joke she and my father shared and while there's a certain happiness in Jingle Bell Rock, for hard-core jollies, try Adeste Fideles (as sung by someone who thought the Wise Men had given The Child the gift of Frankenstein, since I had no idea what frankincense was).

We've become people who are more familiar with the returns policy at The Mall and online merchants than the hours during which confessions are heard at the local church, or as I heard it called the other day by someone too young to be facetious, "The God Store." Many of us will spend today through Sunday seeking out that special present for our special someone and I wish those of us in that situation the best of luck.

I’m told a friend is a present you give to yourself and there's no such thing as strangers, only friends we haven't met. If both of those are true, since this is after all, Christmas, when miracles can and do happen, as you're heading home whenever your last last-minute shopping expedition ends, rather than follow The Star, seek out someone you’ve passed in your travels whose travails you realize could have been yours and share some of the change, paper and coins, in your trouser and jacket pockets. You'll never miss it, and someone you'll never meet will be grateful for a moment of peace on the ground.

Merry Christmas! 
-bill kenny