So It's Christmas
December 25, 2005
I don’t think of myself as someone who is big on holidays. If I were pressed to choose a favorite, I might pick Thanksgiving. I enjoy family and football, in that order, and I like the relative simplicity of Thanksgiving and the sentiment of giving thanks. I’m also in Boston, close to where the holiday began, so I do have that same sense of impending winter, the need to buckle down, and the urge to be thankful for the bounty that is in front of us, at this moment.
I also might pick the Fourth of July, the one summer holiday, since summer is my favorite season. The Fourth of July is also symbolic of great beginnings—the birth of the nation and the beginning of the real hot weather of summer (around here anyway). It also close enough to the end of the school year that I still associate it with commencement—the end of school and the start of a new phase in life.
But Christmas is full of meaning of course. I have some childhood memories that I have touched on here and here. I also have seen Christmas anew over the last 15 years as my sons have gone from babies to toddlers to little boys to big boys and almost young men. My 14-year-old has made this amazing transformation the past few years. At 12, he was still all about what was under the tree for him. Last year, he groped for meaning in the holiday, saying out loud on Christmas day, “I don’t know what to think about Christmas this year.” And then this year he bought the most thoughtful and generous gifts for his brother, his mother, and me. When I helped him wrap the presents for his mother last night, he said, “I wanted to get two presents each for you and Mom because, you know, you’re my parents and you get me so much and do so much for me.”
For all his teenage awkwardness, my son is startlingly good at saying out loud what I sometimes only wish I could say. How many times I could have said, “I don’t know what to think about Christmas this year”—whether it was because I was 13 or 19 or 46. And how many times I could have expressed my gratitude in such a direct and warm way.
So maybe that is why I hesitate to say Christmas is my favorite holiday. Perhaps it is too hard to know exactly what to think about a day filled with so much meaning. Perhaps it is too powerful to fully consider the obvious—how much we owe to the people most important in our lives. At Thanksgiving, we pause and give thanks, share a meal, watch some football, nap. At Christmas, we are too rushed to merely pause, and we have the extra task of choosing and bringing gifts. We bring these gifts hoping, in our heart of hearts, that we have chosen and are bringing the right gifts, the ones that show how we really feel about the living, breathing, smiling people taking them from our hands.
Posted by Bill Trippe at December 25, 2005 11:53 AM
