Outside The Box

Tracey and I treat ourselves to some really fine hot chocolate this time of year. It’s the good stuff, not the hydrogenated high fructose off-the-shelf alkali powder. We melt and stir and wait, and simply ignore the list of ingredients on the package of marshmallows.

Christmas is a bit like dark chocolate. The fellowship and good cheer, the decorations and music are sweet; the empty seats around the table can be bitter, especially if those seats were recently vacated.

Our table is small this year, but we are blessed with a crowded house of memories that still glows warmly after all these years. The bitter notes are blended to a fine flavor like the cup of good coffee sitting at my right hand.

An elderly friend once told me that for some, a bitter truth about holidays is that they remind us that the longer we survive, the more irrelevant we can become. It begins so gradually we hardly notice. The phone doesn’t ring as often. There are no letters in the mailbox and the inbox is full of spam. Christmas greetings are sent by text.

If enough time passes, we begin to observe that no one wants to hear our stories anymore. They are told in a dead language about a world that no longer exists. We are a Christmas ornament to be celebrated briefly and then set aside, or a debt to be serviced. People look right through us as if we were transparent, and it seems like we gradually become invisible as we lose family and friends to time, geography, and life changes.

I’m still a young man, but enough water has passed under the bridge for me to begin suspecting, especially during Christmas, that perhaps the purpose of time is to perform the task of erasing the ego that we are either unable or unwilling to do ourselves. Underneath the decorations and the material spectacle that this season has become, is Christ reminding us that we are souls, after all, and what pleases the ego is rarely nourishing to the soul.

So here’s what I want you to do this holiday season. Enjoy it to the fullest, and say out loud that for which you are grateful. Make some time to step outside the brightly decorated holiday box and speak to the elderly woman sitting alone at the restaurant. Sit with her for a while. Ask the Vietnam veteran coming out of the grocery about his hat, and listen to his story. Truly listen, looking him square in the face with both feet pointed in his direction, not with one shoe pointed toward the car confessing that you would rather be somewhere else.

Take a plate of warm leftovers to a neighbor’s house, the one whose kids didn’t come home for the holidays this year. Go ahead and call that aunt that you only talk to on Christmas, but this time keep her on the phone and ask her a lot of questions.

We can all celebrate again this year the privilege of living in these beautiful mountains, green valleys, and sheltered coves, and here is the best part: The acts of kindness and generosity I just mentioned are the very things that so many of you already do. That, above and beyond the scenery that decorates the hillsides, is why we love it here, and a merry Christmas to you all!