A Christmas more grand than I deserve

Published 9:52 am Wednesday, December 26, 2018

By any measure, this would be different sort of Christmas Day. I knew that weeks before it arrived.

For one, I would spend it apart from my wife of 37 years. Never done that, not since the year before we married.

Once, I worked a full Christmas Day at a new job in Tupelo, Mississippi while Carey and our first child were at her folks’ home in Birmingham, Alabama. I got off past 8 on Christmas night, sped toward Alabama, and arrived — only my wife was awake — at 11:50 p.m. The baby was fast asleep. But at least I had 10 minutes of Christmas with family. That counted, at least for me.

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Before I whine too much, there’s this, too: Carey and I had the weekend before Christmas with our youngest daughter and our son in law. We had grillades and rice and pumpkin spice ice cream, exchanged some gifts, went to Mass and watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” — colorized. It was a new world, knowing the color of Donna Reed’s dresses — knowledge my daughter found precious — and of Jimmy Stewart’s neckties, which caught my attention throughout the movie. So some Christmas mysteries were made plain to us, moving from black and white to color.

I’ve worked countless Christmas Days, but usually in the same city as the rest of the family. We’d do Midnight Mass — my favorite, especially if the choir is on its game — unwrap gifts in the morning and I’d leave for work after lunch.

Sometimes I’d do Christmas breakfast with first responders, or a feature story at the hospital and get home after lunch. Sometimes I’d report those sad stories about wrecks or family violence on Christmas that end in tragedy. Sometimes I’d have nothing but dry cop runs or the birth announcements. Then I’d get to go home.

Sometimes I drew Christmas duty because I was the new guy on staff. Sometimes I was in charge and it was how I could get most of my crew off for the day. But somehow, the stars as aligned made trouble for me this year. Unless I apply some perspective.

If Christmas were solely a family day, I would have cause for lament. If it were about the eggnog — OK, we had some at work Monday — or decorations or gifts or mirth than I’d have cause to sulk. And so what if I carried my favorite Christmas CD back to Nederland, only to discover on a lonesome Christmas Eve that the CD itself was somewhere back in Louisiana?

How often, when we hear Christmas songs in retail stores in October, do we say we’ve drifted from the meaning of the season? How often do we decry Christmas commercialism or Church vs. State spats over crèches or “O Holy Night” at the public school pageant? “Christmas as a family event” is better than “Christmas as a shopping spree” or “Christmas as a lawsuit,” to be sure, but at its core Christmas is more profound than any of these things.

If Christmas were only a family day, then what about people without families? What about first responders or hospital staff or mariners or military far from home and on the job? Don’t they have a Christmas, though they are far from family? Of course they do.

Scott Hahn wrote as much in “Joy to the World,” when he quotes theologian Joseph Ratzinger — later Pope Benedict XVI — speaking to the truth of Christmas: That is, that Jesus appeared as a child, the divine Son, sent by his father to lead us past our sins. He is his father’s image. It is as Son, Hahn writes, that we come to know him at Christmas.

“One who has not grasped the mystery of Christmas has failed to grasp the decisive element in Christianity. One who has not accepted this cannot enter the kingdom of heaven,” Ratzinger wrote. That’s a big deal.

So I stopped my whining. Two hours later, I crossed Nederland Avenue and entered the church alone, midnight approaching, a bell choir and magnificent cantor and soloist at the ready, with church family if not my own wife and children. It wasn’t what I’d planned, but it was more than enough.

I was ready to meet the Son — again — and Christmas would be more grand than I ever deserved.

Ken Stickney is editor of The Port Arthur News.