I love Christmas. Digging out dusty ornaments; my favorite are the ones with worn paint and fading letters - "Baby's First Christmas" - but I like the new ones, too. I love putting together the little town of houses my Dad has collected over the years - should we put the dentistry next to the school house this year? Where does the train go through the town?
I love the scratchy sound the old Elvis Christmas record makes when we decorate the tree as a family. I only like real Christmas trees. I crave spiked cider. I know every word to It's A Wonderful Life and can recite with perfection what each day of Christmas goes with what - who wouldn't want seven maids a milking?
Christmas is a time for the child in us. The child that couldn't sleep on Christmas Eve, wiggling in footed pajamas in anxious anticipation. The child that knew, just knew that Santa was real (still knows!) and refuted every bully's taunts and supposed proof of the opposite. The child that heard the bells, heard the hooves on the rooftop, set traps to catch jolly Old St. Nick - that childlike innocence that becomes fuzzier with each passing year.
Yes, it gets harder to decorate and celebrate as we gain experience, bills, wrinkles. Getting a real Christmas tree just takes so much time, it's so expensive, who's going to clean the needles, we have to water it, I'm not even going to be here at Christmas. That music is driving me nuts. I'm not even religious and I just hate the holidays.
You don't have to be religious. You don't have to want an ipad or want anything at all, really. You just need a little spark of that childlike wonder in your heart, the big brown eyes of your former five year old self that once believed, once loved getting the decorations out of the box, the one who wrote letters to the North Pole and argued over who had the best Christmas tree in town. The one who was the Angel in the school Christmas play, the one who baked the softest sugar cookies in the shape of reindeer with Grandma. The one who came home from school with a belly ache and candy cane breath after the class Christmas party.
If you think decorating is too much work, if you're not into "that stuff" - I say Bah Humbug to you, you Grinch, you Scrooge, you Frank Cross! Even if you don't get a tree, light a menora, watch "Charlie Brown's Christmas" and argue with your friends over which character you are, it's never too late to start. Remember the childlike joy that Christmas once brought you. That joy and innocence is still there, you just have to find it and work a little harder at it. So deck the halls, stand under the mistletoe, make snow angels and string popcorn. 'Tis the season.
“What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough”, says Ebenezer Scrooge to his nephew. “What reason have you to be morose, uncle? You’re rich enough." "Merry Christmas!" said Scrooge, "Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books... if I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should! Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!"
"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say," returned the nephew. "Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round -- as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"
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