Generations. We are indelibly tied together. I cannot think about Christmas without missing Grammy in her red dress crooning a slightly “dutchified” tune about Jesus in his manger. And I cannot rise from my bed on Christmas morning without remembering my grandfather’s grin beneath the blinding light of his 1960s moving picture camera. I’d never considered how early they had extracted themselves from their warm quilted beds in order to be at our house before the sun came up. They have been gone for over twenty years. And as I remember them now, I love them all the more in retrospect.
Adoring tradition, I now find GREAT delight in tormenting my own family with maddening rituals. Any good mother does. And despite moans of mistreatment when my children (who are now considerably taller than me) are compelled to sit upon the stairs for their annual Christmas morning picture, I am gleeful with the near certainty that they will someday force their own children to do the same.
I begin playing Christmas carols as soon as I can get away with it. Living with a man who pretends to be Scrooge makes this a dicey proposition. I’ve loved these traditional songs since my childhood. I’ve belted them out with my family of origin gathered around my mother’s piano. I’ve sat transfixed as they were sung in the church of my childhood by an impossibly high soprano with fabulous blonde hair. I can recall caroling with gusto as frostbite threatened my fingertips and toes. The words of these carols are ingrained. So how is it that I have failed on many occasions to grasp the significance of the lyrics? Tradition has had an unexpected side effect. Immunity.
I realized this irony when I was alone in my kitchen baking my tenth batch of Christmas cookies last December. I had reached the point when the cookies had passed from ooey-gooey and fabulously delicious to rows and rows of completely unappealing baked toil. Trying to lift the elation of the season above the looming nausea of ingesting too many carbohydrates, I was singing loudly with Josh Groban. We were managing a magnificent duet, if I do say so myself... Our musical selection was “O Holy Night” and the previously unappreciated phrase hit me square in my over-cookied gut.
Read it as though you’d never heard it before.“He appeared and the soul felt its worth.” This sorely overlooked and wondrous truth puts this amazing gift into just a little bit of perspective. Before the arrival of that sweet and miraculous baby in the manger, the soul had been as completely oblivious as I.
Had I been listening more closely as my grandmother crooned, I may have felt the impact 45 years sooner.
So to my faithful blog readers (and the dedicated if not coerced friends and family who read just because they know I will ask if they have…), I wish you a joyful and blessed Christmas season. And I pray that you too will be stopped in your busy December tracks by a new and delightful awareness of God made flesh among us. His very breath, the promise of the greatest gift we could ever choose to receive.
