CHRISTMAS CAROL

Last night, like every December for thirty years, Ed called me “Christmas Carol”. I was struck by how sweet he sounded, and how his eyes still do this twinkly Santa thing. He calls me Christmas Carol because he’s watched me, over and over, often against my will, fall slap dab in love with Christmas.

I sense and feel Christmas, rather than think about it. I soak in it. Whatever’s going on these few weeks in the year’s last month, it feels poignant and rich, and, though I mourn the passage of time, I’m grateful for the season and its undercurrent of excited anticipation.

But this year has been ultra-dark, and so has my heart. We see our family every other Christmas, so it’s just Ed and me this year, drenched in distress about where our country is headed, short tempered, short on patience. Well, okay, I’m the one short on patience.

But what I lack in patience, I make up for with determination. I don’t want a whole lot, but what I do want, I want with passion. This year, I want Christmas to be Christmas, not a fear fest.

So. I set up a table with the happys I buy all year and dug out the half used rolls of green and red paper and the glossy red ribbon and the recycled boxes and bags. I piled the spice mixes and the wooden jewelry and the herbal hand ointments and the candles in the middle. I pictured our Mississippi nieces and nephews eating the chocolate Happy Hippos. I ate a little chocolate myself.

I bought “All I Really Want”, advent readings by Quinn Caldwell, and I read them to Ed each morning and night. I read about learning to wait and how hard that is and how waiting can be its own reward, and I forgive myself, yet again, for not exactly being the best waiter in the world. I practice breathing when I’m anxious. And mad. And sad. I practice a lot.

“Get an Advent calendar,” Caldwell says. Ours has little chocolate toys behind the windows. Ed and I take turns opening them. My first window opened to a tiny chocolate train. Ed got a chocolate Christmas goose. Santa must like me because, yesterday, I got a package from a friend with two kinds of chocolate. It’s about half gone today.

Caldwell suggests finding the song “Prepare Ye”, from Godspell, cranking it up to “about 11”, and dancing around with the music, flinging tinsel everywhere. We found the song on Youtube, but it was way too raucous and didn’t move me at all, so we turned it off. Throwing tinsel at each other was silly fun though. Silver shone all over the floor.

Though I always bemoan how early the radio stations play Christmas music, I turned on the car radio and belted out The Twelve Days of Christmas in my best soprano. When I got home, I basked in Elvis crooning he’ll have a blue, blue Christmas without me. Elvis misses me every single year. I never know exactly when I’ll hear the Beatles sing, “And so this is Christmas…and what have you done?”, but when I do, I’ll cry my eyes out in the happiest way, because I loved that song last year and the year before and so many years before that. For an instant, as Caldwell describes, I step out of “chronos”, or ordinary time, into “kairos”, where time collapses, every moment is one, and the past, the present, and the future are all with and part of me.

I have long longed to sing somewhere outside my kitchen or my car. Two weeks ago, I joined the choir at a local, progressive church that centers around social justice. Never mind that I can’t read music. Never mind my voice can be capricious and unwieldy. At the morning service, upfront with the choir, I stretched my voice and stifled my ego and sang a gorgeous French Carol called “Ring the Bells”. At the end of the service, I squelched my fear and read an acrostic poem I wrote, titled “Christmas Courage”. I told you I was determined.

Determination and hope are entwined in my world. I have just enough hope that acting on it doesn’t feel entirely futile, and when I act, good things happen, and that gives me enough hope to be determined and thus act the next time. I got what I wanted–Christmas is Christmas. I’ll ask God and Santa for a boatload of hope next year—hope that enough determination from enough of us will bring some light into our struggling country, and our world.

Happy Hannukah, Joyous Kwanzaa, Merry Christmas, and Blessings from Christmas Carol. And chocolate. Lots.

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