Celestial illumination

Celestial illumination, a photo by Ole C. Salomonsen on Flickr.

A beautiful picture by Ole C. Salomonsen.

A reminder to celebrate the heavenly host, however you understand it.

Maybe, just maybe, thousands of years ago, shepherds on a hillside beheld a sight like this and found renewed hope.

Maybe, just maybe, those shepherds felt, for just a few moments, that though the were lowly citizens of their time, they were a beautiful and perfect part of one universe.

May you see magic in this holiday season. When that magic happens, don’t analyze it. Just live it in the moment and appreciate it in that deep place in your soul that is the source of awe.

Peace on earth.

A Christmas story of right or wrong, or right?

My father-in-law was in his late teens at the time of the Great Depression. He was a driven young man who always worked hard and never settled for second best. When he graduated from high school, he earned a full scholarship to the University of Toronto.

But he couldn’t take it.

There was no social safety net then—no employment insurance, or universal health care, or welfare.

His parents were not able to work, and they were a poor family in Cabbagetown. My father-in-law passed up the full scholarship to university to take a job stamping sizes in underwear, so that his family could have a place to live and food to eat.

He was working the evening shift one Christmas Eve in the mid-1930s.

After midnight, in the early hours of Christmas morning, he walked home in the dark. He passed a Christmas tree lot, closed for the night. There was no tree at his house that year. In downtown Toronto, Christmas-like trees in their natural setting were not to be found, and the family could not afford to buy one.

He pondered the trees leaning there. They were unwanted now that Christmas was upon them. He picked one up, carried it home and spent several hours through the night decorating it. When his parents woke up the next morning, their gift was a decorated Christmas tree.

How many of us take our Christmas trees for granted now?

Could we imagine a situation where a Christmas tree would be out of reach for us? How much things have changed.

I think of this story often at Christmas. My father-in-law did something wrong—he took something that belonged to someone else without paying. And yet, he did something so right. The love and devotion he had for his family he gave to them in the guise of a Christmas tree that year.

In the barn with animal poop and stuff

“Now I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.”
—Native American storyteller

The New Zealand Herald posted this video created with the children of St Paul’s Church in Auckland. It’s a traditional telling of the Christmas story. I don’t know if the Christmas story happened this way or not, but I know that this telling of it is really cute.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/video.cfm?c_id=1&gallery_id=115925&gal_cid=1

Forgiveness at Christmas

We found the box at the very back of the bottom shelf of a basement storage area.

“Wonder what’s in there?” we asked as we blew the dust off the unmarked cardboard box.

My brother-in-law pried back the cardboard flaps to find Christmas gifts from 1954, still wrapped. Labels indicated that the presents were for my husband’s parents and his older brother—the only sibling born at the time—but they had never been opened.

“Huh,” my husband said. “These must be from the year of “the falling out.”

The gifts were from family members that I had heard about but never met, because after “the falling out” the relationship had never healed properly and soon was irrevocably broken. “The falling out” in 1954 had obviously happened at some point between the delivery of the presents and Christmas Day.

“What did they fight about?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” my husband said.

We looked down on 57 years festering resentment stored up in a dust-covered box. What’s more, the family had moved in 1965, so they had packed up this box 11 years later and moved it from one house to another.

“What should we do with them?” I asked.

“It’s about time we opened them,” my brother-in-law said.

We found two shirts for my father-in-law, a dressing gown for my mother-in-law and a little shirt and pant set for the then 2-year-old brother. Of all the poignant moments that we experienced when we cleaned out my mother-in-law’s house, that stays with me as the saddest.

So much waste. Wasted gifts. Wasted family connections. And we have no idea why.

This Christmas:

1. Don’t let festering resentments linger in the basement.
2. Don’t pack them up and bring them with you wherever you go.
3. Not everything is easy to forgive, I realize, but if there’s a chance that, in 57 years, your children or grandchildren will ask, “What did they fight about?” and the answer will be, “I have no idea,” let whatever it is that you’re holding onto go.