As I sit here writing this I am still shaking off the effects of a turkey induced tryptophan nap. Almost all of my family spent Christmas with us and most have just left leaving the house feeling oddly empty (which is at once a good and bad thing). I look around at the ruins that remain and marvel at the sheer quantity of empty boxes and trash bags full of wrapping paper and I am once again struck by how excessive Christmas has become for so many of us. And nowhere is that more true than here.

We had so many presents piled around the tree that it looked like a Hollywood set gone horribly wrong. I don’t even recall all that I got, much less what all the kids got. And my in-laws, brother and his wife and kids, my sister and her husband or my parents? Forget about it. Not a clue. It bordered on absurd, but I prefer to think of it as doing our part to ward off recession. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. And in sorting and handing out the packages I got a small taste of what FedEx or USP must face from a logistics standpoint. We were still opening stuff when Christy’s brother called at 11:00 to wish us a Merry Christmas;  we started at 7:30 only breaking for a short breakfast. During and after that I was busy cooking away preparing a meal that was very nearly as excessive as the shrine to retail in the next room. I almost needed a written plan for getting everything to come out on time.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I feel exceedingly blessed that we are able to do those things and I had a fantastic, if a little long, day. I’m a firm believer in the ‘too many cooks’ theory so I pretty much do the entire meal myself but, as crazy as it sounds, I rather enjoy doing it. It is somehow theraputic for me. And, though I was the only cook, I had a steady stream of company at the other side of the island. I got to spend the morning and early afternoon chatting with my family in a far more one-on-one setting than is the norm. And we all had a great time socializing afterwards. We caught each other up on the current events in our lives, reminisced about old times and laughed at each other more than a little and we spent the entire day together as a family under one roof again, which is an unfortunately rare event these days.

I find that time together especailly refreshing at the end of what becomes a more hectic period every year. There are the weeks of shopping and days of decorating and wrapping and planning of meals and mailing cards and helping with kids Christmas parties and attending various Christmas parties and all the other 100 little things that are part of Christmas to attend to. I am rarely more exhausted than I am in the weeks leading up to Christmas and that is saying a lot for me. I just feel like I can’t get five minutes to myself. And all of that effort leads up to the big day which is perhaps busiest of all. Worth it, but so very busy.

Again, I’m not complaining about our Christmas nor the work that goes into it now about the excesses so many of us indulge in, but it does make me wonder if we lose sight of the real reason we celebrate it to begin with. So many of us will tell you that “Jesus is the reason for the season” and always capitalize ‘Christmas’ and never, ever use the term Xmas, but I sometimes wonder how much of that is reflex and how much is real. I mean, I see the manger in so many yards and I wonder how many people have stopped and considered the real inspriation for that scene. Lets forget for a moment that the ‘three wise men’ were never at the manger. For that matter the magi are mentioned in the Bible, but nowhere does it say there were three of them. And I’m reasonably sure that Santa nor his reindeer were anywhere in the vacinity in spite of what is suggested in so many yards I see. Nevertheless, at least people are still putting out the nativity scene at all, and that’s great, but what I really wonder is how many people have stopped and considered that the nativity story is not at all a ’story.’ That is, it isn’t a storybook tale with a neat little manger and benevolent wise men, but I suspect that is how it is thought of by most people. If you believe the story to be a true one – and I do – you really have to consider the magnitude and reality of the nativity scene and the events surrounding it.

Stop and consider for a moment that Joseph and Mary travelled something likely approaching 100 miles while she was nine months pregnant. And we aren’t talking about our standard mini-van trip. We are talking about 100 hard miles through mostly desert on foot or on livestock at a time when few people ever travelled anywhere near that far. And there wasn’t a McDonalds to be found anywhere along the route. It was a major undertaking. And if you’ve ever been around someone who is 9 months pregnant you know the kind of discomfort a trip like that must have caused Mary. And once they arrived in Bethelehem there was nowhere to stay. The best they could do for sleeping arangements is a barn. A barn.

For most of us, our idea of a bad trip is if the hotel books us into a room with two full beds instead of a king or, God forbid, you have to stay in a Motel 6 because the Marriott is overbooked. But imagine for a moment that you arrive in town and check every hotel you can find to no avail until one kind manager offers to let you sleep in the parking garage. That is basically what we are talking about here. Now, most of us are city dwellers and the closest we’ve been to a barn is on an old rerun of Dallas so we really don’t have a grasp of the situation beyond what we see in the scene on our mantle but, the thing is, barns are not exactly cozy places. They have hardpacked floors and rather strong unpleasant odors for starters. They are not somewhere well suited for human habitation; they aren’t somewhere you would want to sleep and they certainly aren’t somewhere you would want to go through childbirth. And yet, that is exactly what happened.  Mary gave birth in a barn and she did so without an epidural. I know, right? How primative. Not only that, but she had no nice clean bed, no modern medical facility and no pain killers. She had a barn. And some hay. And the best they could come up with for a place to put the newborn was an animal feeding trough. And all of that is just the actual birth.

Looking back it is a wonder that the birth ever took place at all. Put yourself in Joseph’s shoes for a moment. Your bethrothed turns up pregnant and the best story she can come up with is that God did it. It sounds like I am being glib, but I’m not. I mean, from his perspective that must be what it sounded like. We’ve fictionalized biblical characters to the point that we’ve washed out the reality that they were human, but they were; they weren’t the two dimensional characters we picture any more than the 50’s were really in black and white. In general the bible only relates the salient points of any given story, not the minutae of their day to day lives. They were real people with real feelings and, excepting the main character, none were perfect. You know that Joseph was hurt and likely very mad and yet his reaction was to hide her suspected indescretion from the world. Now, thats a stand-up guy. When you consider that the penalty for her at that time would have been being stoned to death, that whole event could have, and probably should have for that time, turned out very differently.

Then after Jesus’ birth the three wise men visited King Herod asking after Jesus. Herod was less than thrilled and, ultimately, ordered all children under the age of two in the area around Bethlehem be killed. Let me repeat that. The king ordered that his men go out and kill all the children under the age of two. I can’t think of anything more horrific than that, personally. When removed from the abstraction of the story I suspect most of us couldn’t imagine what that would be like. And, by conventional wisdom, Jesus should have been caught in that heinous sweep. So, once again, He escaped an event that should have resulted in his death before he really even got started.

And after he was born, there were all the milestones any child has. He took his first steps and cut his first tooth and probably left Mary as sleep deprived as any modern child does for a time. He made little ‘presents’ for mom (I suspect that, even then, dads rarely changed those) and laughed and cooed and learned to talk just like any baby or child, then or now. And he was raised as a normal child to a large extent, studying carpentry at Joseph’s side and working as a tradesman until well into adulthood. In other words, He was a real person. And, still, we distill it down to an idyllic scene with kneeling sheep and fluffy hay.

While that does make for a nice, clean, encapsulated and easy to digest version of events I think it does a disservice in that it allows us to mentally relegate it, at least in part, to the same mental bin as the three little pigs and Humpty Dumpty. Instead we focus far more on the shopping and planning and cooking, only giving lip service to our beliefs; and we spend far more time getting the turkey right and the lights right than getting our lives right. It’s really kind of sad when you think about it.

So, what now, Greg? Well, I’m so very glad you asked. If only I had all the answers. Heck, if only I had some small portion of the answers. I really don’t know what the answer is. How do we combat that commerialized complacency? Well, perhaps next time you put that manger scene up on your mantle put some dirt around it. Move the wise men out to around two years away and position Joseph so he is shooing the kneeling sheep away from eating the hay around baby Jesus. Add a little, um, compost to the dirt to give it that real barn smell then stop and consider. Maybe, just maybe, then you’ll be reminded when you look up there that you aren’t celebrating an abstract event, but the birth of a real, live baby; one that would change the world in equally real ways for thousands of years to come. Just a thought.

/g

Another kitchen sucessfully trashed! And I’m only about half way done here. =o)

But, man, did my my bird come out good. =oD