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Christmas Galore

December 20, 2024   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

It is fun to see the town ablaze with light and cheer, to see the annual Christmas tree by the Opera House. House owners deck their lawns, encouraged by the enchanting repetition of the exercise and the tempting competition for the crown of the best lawn in town.

Christmas is a time of heightened emotions for better or not, when memories can come in very strongly and are welcomed in our daily routine instead of ignoring them. Altogether, this can be a very reflective time with New Year’s following sharply a week later. 

That can be a great thing to haul our seasonal reminiscing out from some dusty corner of our minds. I really love Christmas for the way it draws everything to a halt – after the craze and rush of pre-Christmas preparations. Time to actually get our brains away from our own concerns and turn our thoughts to other people. 

In the big and small picture, there is generally someone worse off than we are. Well – in our choosing of gifts for others, we inevitably take a pause to consider the soul to whom we are planning to offer a token of, at least our good wishes and, at most our undying affection. 

These offerings take planning and that planning is equal to the gift itself because we are diverted from self-absorption to focusing on others, another.

Meanwhile, we are making more memories and memories to come. Season of light, season of dark, with the promise of more light to come – inevitably, in fact, and in our minds and lives, we hope.

For those captivated by the dark, we look to Christmas to turn their eyes toward the light, this time of love and remembering love and hoping to find new love where or if love was lost. Can we play a role?

There are a couple of very meaningful stories that are the basis for Christmas – the role of Santa Claus who is more and more the hero of the feast in our locale and he is a fine model of foolishness but also the tender subject of gift giving and caring for others. The virtues of cookies and milk during a busy night.

Saint Nicholas, the founding name for Santa Claus, was born in Greece in the Third Century, His wealthy parents were devout Christians. When they died from a plague while Nicholas was still young, he used his wealth to help the poor and was famous for his gifts to those in need.

The other is a baby’s birth. 

There are plenty of sources from the time of Jesus’ life to confirm that he is a historical figure about who many stories of wonder were reported by historians at the time. Paul’s letters describing Jesus and his relationship with Paul apparently still exist to this day. 

It seems that Easter is a great time to question his existence but historical truth is maybe stronger than what passes on the pages of many publications nowadays.

My Muslim friends have told me they revere Jesus as a prophet; that they believe in his virgin birth.

What is the story: an angel told a young woman, Mary, that she would bear a child without being with a man; another visited an older man, Joseph to tell him to take care of Mary and not to feel shame.

When her time came, they had fled and because the inn they found had no rooms, she delivered her boy child in a manager, with the animals in the shelter nearby. Angels filled the air with song and a star brought three kings with gifts for him. A time of miracles, a moment of great joy. And we love the old songs that we sing every year, in a church or just with friends,

Somehow the songs are thrilling and they warm our hearts to sing them, and that time, we can believe in a birth that – like it or not – changed the world – entered into a new time – a new calendar we basically still use, despite Pope Gregory XIII fiddling with it in 1582.

As a species, we have believed and longed to understand the spiritual side of living; always been looking up; been telling stories about immortal beings, looking like us perhaps, but wiser, certainly stronger. Seeing so much more about us than we ever could.

Even science is longing to find God, to finally settle the matter that such a being exists in some form.

Yet. This is Christmas and we have the right to embrace it with all the excitement and joy we want. To take this selfless time off and spread our good wishes as far and warm as we can; to tell people at random you hope they enjoy this moment. Whatever it is called and however it is celebrated, it is a holiday of light.

From this writer too, my very wishes and hopes for you all; and that we may come to a New Year with better hopes.

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