Ghosts of Christmas Past

I would like to formally submit my childhood Christmases to the pantheon of the world’s greatest. I lived in a tiny bucolic town in the middle of the middle west, not much more than a long bike ride away from my extended family. I was an only child and for over a decade an only grandchild, the boy-child centerpiece of a season pre-built for solitary boy-childs.

I would spend Sunday nights in the empty pews watching my parents and their friends rehease the Christmas Cantata, and when opportunity arose, get chosen for the little boy solo of the children’s program.

Christmas Eve I was squeezed into a woolen sweater and propped up on stage with my peers for a stirring rendition of “Away in a Manger”, candlelit Silent Night, and a bag full of goodies for every person packed into the smoking hot sanctuary. From there we went to the Gast Family Christmas Eve. A house stretched to the seams with my grandpa’s 11 siblings and their various progeny. Suasage Cheese Dip, Sugar Cookies, and ham balls. (Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as ham balls.)

Christmas day was a marathon. Only child giftapalooza in the morning, lunch and more gifts at my mom’s parents, evening dinner and more gifts at my dad’s. An objective viewer would recognize that I was being spoiled beyond belief, but there’s room at the inn for objectivity at Christmas.

Most years it was snow-covered. My mom is a master decorator. My Christmas world was something out of a fairy tale. A world I have struggled to reconstruct ever since.

Nostalgia, Straight to the Vein, Please.

Memories of our picture-perfect past are always tantalizing. All the more so at Christmas. Our stories are an Antiques Roadshow of collectibles, some of them priceless, some of them frauds, some of them only useful to their original owners. Regardless, the farther we age into obscurity, the more we become convinced that the past was where it happened. The room we want to be in must have been back there somewhere.

As a person who has spent more than a little of my life collecting versions of the past to build a coherent present, I can attest. Surely the college-aged me I’ve constructed, the one on fire for his faith and impenetrable to doubt is the one. But then I imagine the late 20s one, fighting for his dream, actively building a new world of faith every day.

On less altruistic days, it is the late 30s version of me. Highly compensated. Well-traveled. Full of Marriott credits.

Who we were “then” is so tantilizing, so sparkling in its holiday glitter that we forget how much we’ve polished off the rough bits. Rewritten our complicities. Isolated the villains.

The past, as much as the present, is complex. All Christmases, even the most well-funded, happen in Middeeastern caves, are attended by asses, shrouded in darkness so only the starlight gets through.

“Stop straining to keep the door to the past open, as if your old life is there, waiting, and you could just slip right in.”

— Maggie Smith

Christmas Lost & Found

Where are you Chistmas, why can’t I find you?
Why have you gone away?
My world is changing, it’s rearranging—
Does that mean Christmas changes, too?

— Cindy Lou Who

2020, like all its gifts, offers us the kind of Christmas we probably wouldn’t have asked for. The woolen socks of gifts. Many—even sometimes me—have tried to tell us that this year’s gifts are good for us. They have slowed us down, recalibrated our expectations, reconnected us to the natrual paces of life. This is called calibration, fine-tuning our sense of who we are to fit the surroundings we are offered. It is the opposite of nostalgia. When done correctly, it attunes us to the fertile of magic of what is.

Of course these gifts have also taken as much or more than they’ve given. They’ve taken jobs, family members, our last nerves, security—false and real. 2020’s Santa has been dangerously green-hued and furry, Grinchy in his unwillingness to let us da-hoo-dor-ese our way into yuletide serenity.

The pandemic has proven in a way that nearly nothing else could the slowness is not necessarily serenity. The absence of our distractions and our preferences is like a receding tide. Pulling back the waters, the crevices of our unpolished existence are revealed.

What of you has been revealed this year?

What hopes? What fears? What rigid defenses and faux securities?

The birth of the Messiah is always revealing. It reveals donkeys as royal stallions. Mangers as thrones. Shepherds as the king’s guard. It reveals kings as monsters and empires as genocidal villains.

It shows that power is not love. But love is the deepest power.

There is a Herod in all of us, willing to burn the world to retain our semblance of normal. There is a innkeeper in all of us, sticking to business and refusing to be disrupted. And there is a Messiah in each of us, rising up out of the lowly dust. Awakening the Spirit within.

Happy Christmas, dear friends. Next year we will tarry here again and again. Losing and finding. Releasing the past, awakening the Eternal Now.