The Christmas Article

If you squish your eyes together it all looks like stars. Slowly the rest of the world is vacuumed out, the lights streak towards your eyes, your nostrils fill with the smell of dinner, spices and sweetness, the warmth of your dog resting in your lap and the sounds of Bing Crosby crooning about some White Christmas.

This is, at its' most beautiful, how I imagine Christmas. This romantic ideal of peace, love, contentedness, happiness. But while I was struggling to come up with what to write for the Christmas article, I found myself not able to think of a past Christmas, or at least a memorable one. Christmas is a rushed creature, a fat man of a holiday that you try to cram too many things into until it eventually explodes.

A friend of mine, one much more educated than myself, who actually listens to the radio for content, heard a report on what people remember Christmas by. Surprisingly, very few remember what gifts they received; people are more inclined to bring back memories of a Christmas than the booty they opened up. For instance: When Dad burned the Christmas goose and the family had to eat Lemon Chicken from the local Chinese restaurant; the year the cat knocked the ornaments off the tree, when the family was at the late service, and Mom was a little quieter; or the time that Grandpa got the Turkey just right, and it melted in your mouth, and nobody has been able to duplicate it since.

We live in a time when Christmas has become Black Friday. A day when the retail stores finally catch up on their fiscal promises and little Johnny gets the newest, the latest, the best of the best toy for the next five seconds. It is a day of gift cards because you don't know the person that you're buying the gift for well enough. It's a day of mailing packages so that you don't have to go see a relative. It's a day of gluttony, as we stuff our bellies so full of food that we bulge out, safe in the excuse that it's the Holidays and this is what we're supposed to do.

It's not that this is bad and I am, perhaps, the biggest hypocrite as I foresee little glasses of scotch parading down main street in my head as I wait in line, at the dollar dance, to go waltzing with the Hamm's bear, but there should be something more to this day. So, dear reader, go out, squish your eyes together and don't look for perfection, let it come to you. I guess that's the lesson in all of this and the miracle of Christmas.