Christmas Remembered

I assume most have treasured memories of childhood, of special days and seasons, of people – relatives, teachers, friends – whose lives and words weave among happy reminiscence. And of course there are many who remember little worth treasuring, for what might have been good and beautiful is blanched by too much of the awful. I grieve for those whose story is so up-side down. And I am grateful for all the good in my own story that managed, in the great line from St. Paul, to “overcome evil with good.”

The story is long and joyful to me, with a thousand points of light (for starters). It could be a book, and should be. Contrary the carmudgeons, I think that is true of everyone's life. Mix in some imagination and dare, a wide-eyed perspective that lets wonder find its breath; throw in bracing honesty and laugh-at-yourself humility and every story sees and emits light that shines through a window on reality.

And that's what we need, I propose. Reality. What other option do we have? Living by lies is no strategy for good living, nor is the pickled, jaundiced look or, for that matter, a foolish naivete. See life as it is, I maintain, and the good seeps out everywhere. I'll just leave that there, knowing all will never agree, including my lesser self on some days.

But I was talking about memories and, in particular, Christmas. Some of the best come from those days in our bungalow on North Glenn. The tree in the old paneled living room was magic. My younger sister and I would get up early and go sit on the floor and soak it in. I was 9, she was 6 and we couldn't wait to open the gifts and, on one or two occasions, we didn't.

There was always food and family. As memories sometimes lodge in the mind and settle in the soul, I once awoke at 2 AM or so on Christmas Day, sat up in bed, hearing voices. The light was on in the kitchen and I peered through the door. My Mom and Dad were together, making cookies, and I still see them smiling at me.

We lived in Ulysses, Kansas, a farming and light-industrial town in the southwest corner of the state. The winters were cold and windy but the main street stores shut it out as best they could. We lived one block off the North end of downtown, across the alley from the Ulysses News, and I could do my

Similar to this in my memory.

Christmas shopping within a few blocks' walk, especially at the Duckwall's store.

Duckwall's was the store that had everything. Baseball gloves that smelled of real leather because they were, arts and crafts, televisions which, if we were lucky, were showing the latest football game. They had an Atari game you could play until the next person indicated your turn was over. Of course there was candy and watches and clothing and who knows what else. It was Walmart lite. It was right.

I remember those low-light winter evenings -- storefronts all lit up, carols playing on the street loudspeakers -- whenever I hear Fogelberg's Same Old Lang Syne, though I'm no fan of the somber purview of that melancholy song. Snow does “turn into rain” as the song says, and there are plenty of sadnesses and “what-might-have-beens” in this life. But we can't live there.

Instead, I live with the happy, the muted wonder of the ordinary in those good days of growing up. Piling into the old white Mercury to go to church, wading through the snow to build a snowman, going back inside too soon to find a seat beside the floor register stove, looking through all the old World Book encyclopedias to learn more than we knew and wondering what life would bring. Whatever we dreamed for the future, it paled beside the wonder of the present.

That all seems true and right to me now. Life is a grand adventure, a gift we barely know how to receive, much less handle. If we let it, Christmas takes us there, past the sadnesses, for they are real indeed. Past even the memories, as much as they mean, to the daring possibility we face every moment, the haunting idea bigger than the world we know: my life matters, breath is a joy beyond knowing, giving and loving and caring make me real again at Christmas and everyday of my life.

I hope you and I can believe again that the sadnesses, whatever they are, do not blanch love and goodness. For in the end evil will lose and good will prevail. I'm all in on that bet. It is the only way to live. Happily, it is the bottom line in all my memories, and it is the life-changing story of Christmas.