Christmas I Don't Knows

We come to the brink of another Christmas, another December 25th, another solstice upon us. We have participated with our fellow community members in carol-singing, cookie-exchanging, card-sharing, coffee-drinking at the Well. We have watched our youngsters dress as shepherds, our video cameras capturing crude re-enactments of this event that our clocks and even our own pulses seem to be ticking toward. Our Advent calendars now have smudges and bent pages. Some of the doors are missing their peppermints. We have checked off many a Christmas ” to-do,” and we are mentally beginning to forget all that we intended to do that didn’t get done again this year.

This will be my 48th Christmas. I have glued many a paper chain. I have baked decades worth of cookies, and I can sing the first, second, and fourth verses of most Christmas hymns by heart. I have stood for many seasons, the candle in my hand, the hot wax dripping as I light the candles of those next me…my children. I can put together the breakfast casserole for Christmas morning with my eyes closed. Christmas is a collage of memories for me full of unpainted junk boards, glitter, angel wings, felt and straw…full of eggs and orange juice, rump roasts, sugar-coatings, and strong coffee….full of baby dolls and little suitcases, little feet sticking out of their pajama bottoms, puzzle pieces, pets under the tree, body parts of robot toys, electronics that can’t ever seem to save us…

I am happy, oh so happy to report, though, that amid the hum-drums, amid the par-for-the-course relatives-behaving-badly, amid the airport delays, the returns without receipt….there is so much mystery alive still for me in this middle-aged Christmas, when I am too old to delight in the snow that I must shovel, when my Christmas cheer at times needs a battery replacement, there is so much about Christmas that I still do not know, that I do not understand. Writers spend most of our time coming to grips at the expense of our reading audience with those points of life we feel we have mastered, those pieces of profoundness and sometimes profanity that we feel we’ve come to the conclusion of once and for all. Our medium, our text, is black and white. We deal in specifics. We look out our windows at a robin on the branch and we attempt to capture some sort of essence or truth about what we have seen. Writers often forget that this bird flies away to a place that is unknown to us and our little truths.


Certainly it is what I don’t know about the robin and her red breast and the tree that mesmerizes me and causes me to question, and brings that image to the forefront of my mind to write about. Certainly it is the ethereal, all the elements that don’t contain carbon, the words which whisper realities, and like the robin fly in and out and through the pages of the Bible that keep me coming back to the words on the page. It’s the feelings I can’t put into words that most convict me of the depth of love I feel for my husband and my children.


It is the resurrective qualities of Christmas that keep me holding on to the traditions that bring me closest to what I cannot adequately express and can only know from a depth that does not write or speak. The resurrective qualities of Christmas place the book of Isaiah smack in the middle of the Gospels. We can never memorize all the scripture that God has orchestrated for us to learn, that is all around us all the time. This week it was for me a little scrap-lumber manger and the hands of a little girl placing her blue leftover material across the front of the highest board, which was less than a foot high had the cradle been placed on the ground. Next Christmas, for me, there will be another image that I will not forget. It might be marshmallows floating in hot cocoa or my kids all sharing a blanket that isn’t big enough to keep one of them warm. It might be the hands of an old woman or the disjunct phone speech of my 90 year-old grandmother talking to me about projects she intends to complete in the coming year, not realizing that at her age she IS the project.


Look around with intention. God will bring His words alive and He will link your thoughts, your words, your experiences to Him, and there is really no word, no picture for this, except what He creates.


This Christmas may your hearts be filled with pictures of God’s Love.
Submitted by Kerri Snell
 
 
Come visit The Well this Christmas season! We will be open 7am to 10pm through Thursday, Dec 23rd. On Christmas Eve, we'll be open from 7am-5pm for those that think the day was made for the entirety of your Christmas shopping or those that want to spend a lazy day sipping hot drinks and enjoying the company of friends. We'll be closed Christmas day, but will open again at 7am on the 27th.