CHRISTMAS CONTRADICTIONS

Christmas Carol big as a barrel, Sandy Claws- a mean fat lobster to make you pause and Rudolph the Red Nose Skunk, always drunk. Some Christmas symbols from an alternate universe.

The biggest birthday party on the planet is upon us from the Prince of Peace in a time of war. The contrasts and contradictions of Christmas are many. When you’re a child, ‘tis the most exciting time of the year with the twin titans- the baby Jesus and Santa Clause- ruling and pulling from opposite sides of the same coin.

There’s the sacred church service and religious celebrations when you’re supposed to sit silently and respectfully in reverence. Then there’s Santa Claus coming down your chimney with your North Pole presents. You’re so excited you can’t sleep and have been bouncing off the walls for weeks.

There’s the star of Bethlehem blazing the way to the manger and the TV weathermen tracking Santa’s sleigh on radar to right under your Christmas tree. There are the three gifts of the Wise Men and the millions of gifts of the Wal-Marts. There’s the Savior of Christianity and the savior of capitalism, where a good or bad Christmas selling season can make or break a corporation.

Without Christmas there would be no Christianity and without Christmas there would be no capitalism, as we know it, for big sales at the end of the year to make the profits. Without it, the stores would have to up the ante on Valentine’s Day and try to make it the biggest buying holiday.

Christmas is the season of love and family, but it’s also the season when the loss of loved ones can make it the worst time of the year for some. We tend to mark our lives in Christmases for better or worse.

Christmas magnifies and wraps our souls in wonderful warmth on a cold December day with family, friends and food. Or it can cast long shadows from the past and dim the light with our losses from divorce, divisions, distance or death.

Christmas is a return to home and family that you may not have seen since the last Christmas reunion. Like a magnet, it pulls the filings of a family together to its center and makes it whole again, if only briefly and brightly.

Christmas can be a time of joy and love or a trial of controlling and cruelty. Families are complex entities with an illogic, all their own, for spreading the most love or the most pain possible, sometimes at the same time.

Christmas gives renewed meaning to passive/aggressive, healing and humiliation, hugging and hatred. It’s the hot red shoe in a black and white world. It’s the pepperoni on the plain pizza. It’s the twinkling stars at night and the burnt out bulbs on the Christmas tree lights.

You start getting ready for Christmas the day after Thanksgiving, but somehow you are never really ready by December 25th. There is still so much to do that you can never do. There are cookies and Wookies, Star Wars’ toys and a joyful noise, hams and yams, fruit pies and bad ties, colorful lights and family fights, phone calls to make and biscuits to bake.

Christmas is a time to try to forget old slights and to remember all the soldiers fighting overseas whose main fear, after being wounded, maimed or killed, is to be forgotten in the crush and rush of Christmas, when they should be home for the holidays.

Then it’s all over for another year and you sit there staring at a frigid January with the credit card bill blues. But until then, Merry Christmas to each and everyone from us to you.