This Time of Year

Harry T. Cook

12/14/08

In the Northern Hemisphere, especially in its Temperate Zone, this time of year is associated in the minds of intentional Christians with the kindled lights of Advent and the approaching celebration of Christmas. Darkness falls sooner and sooner as the solstice approaches, thus does the light and warmth of the holidays help drive back the night.

Speaking of darkness, those of us in the helping professions are routinely prepared at this time of year to sit with persons who are made sad by some emptiness in their lives and find themselves, figuratively or even literally, with their noses pressed against the glass, standing outside looking in as others make merry. The holidays exacerbate their hurt. Ask any analyst, practicing psychiatrist or clinical psychologist. Ask any parish priest or minister. This may be the season to be jolly, but for many it is a time for bitter memory, regret or just fundamental angst.

Why?

Christmas has become a huge cultural thing. Although its roots are in an arcane celebration of a mystical birth of a supposed child-god, the hoopla associated with it has gone way beyond those mythological beginnings. Now Christmas means and seems to call for an excess of emotion, as often as not fueled by various alcoholic concoctions and laden with gastronomical delicacies of all kinds, some — like fruitcake — truly inedible.

“Merry Christmas!” we cry to one another in the street, in the mall, on the elevator, in the corridor and around the neighborhood. “Come around and have a drink,” we say, “or a cup of coffee.” We cut down or cause to be cut down living evergreen trees, drag them into our houses and festoon them with baubles and bangles. Of all people who do that, I am first among them. Why? Because it is what my father did before me and what I have done with all my children and what countless families have done with their children, it seems forever.

The Christmas tree and what eventually lies around its skirted base represents mystery, anticipated generosity, child-like wonder and, above all, tradition. Of course, I speak of a Christmas somewhat unique to the American experience, and then only for those who can or decide to afford it. I dare say that millions of Americans will keep Christmas in straitened circumstances, especially this year what with the economic dislocations that have been visited upon us. Retail merchants are gulping ulcer medicine and biting their nails. People who depend upon seasonal employment aren’t getting hired. Manufacturers of what those retailers and their seasonal employees would be selling have fewer and fewer orders to fill. And so the cycle goes.

Republican senators from the South have apparently decided to re-start the Civil War by destroying the United Auto Workers — the union that gave Detroit its middle-class taxpayers, families and churchgoers, many of whom are African American. So for now, it seems, we’re out of luck.

Here, then, is, as Swift might say, a modest proposal for Christmas 2008: Let us make it one of personal investment of ourselves in other people. Yes, by all means fill up the Salvation Army kettles and give those special gifts for which you are being solicited by charitable institutions. Put a little extra in your church envelope. However, let the primary focus of this season in this year be one of personal regard. Make visits to the homebound who crave company. Use your intuition to sniff out those who are burdened with sorrow and confusion, and walk with them. Let us make ourselves pleasantly weary with sincere well-wishing. Last of all, gather up friends and neighbors and offer to bring them to church on Christmas Eve to hear and to sing the familiar carols and take in the once-a-year atmosphere of greens and poinsettias, candles and chanting as darkness settles over our part of the world and things finally slow down.

This time of year doesn’t need to be a struggle. It need not be marathon of this-ing and that-ing. It can be a time of peace and quiet. Sound too simple for you? Allow me to tell you when my observance of Christmas really begins. I have been all these years usually the last to leave the church after Christmas Eve services. The sick and homebound have been visited. The sermon has been given and the liturgy offered. The nave is darkened with only the vigil light left burning. I walk out into the night where all is calm. And if it is clear, I look up at what few stars the nimbus of city lights lets through. For well the first time in too many days and nights, I stop still and find myself almost overwhelmed with the conviction that, in all the vastness of the universe and that little part of it I can see above me, something so intangible as love exists and that I am both loved and love. That’s the gift, the pearl of great price, the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. So I say to myself, “I do love this time of year, after all.”

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© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.