Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 24, 2023
Christmas Eve
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
It’s Christmas Day in the morning
Your house and your kingdom shall endure forever before me.
Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way. That’s not a song to find Christmas in, since it was written in 1857 to celebrate Thanksgiving. There are lots of other Christmas songs. Muzak in stores is one thing, but Handel’s Messiah is another. The (Mormon) Tabernacle Choir’s rendition of O Little Town of Bethlehem and I’ll Be Home for Christmas is another. Just the tip of the Christmas treasure box. Enough to soothe and settle me into that long winter’s nap.
Yesterday Margaret prepared two pounds of shrimp for shrimp cocktail today. Then we wrapped presents and salted caramels: I’d been forgetting the salt, but at last I remembered to sprinkle the top of what we had left, once the half sheet cake pan full of caramel (about 8 pounds) was cool. We wrapped kid presents in Paw Patrol paper Margaret found at Aldi in Illinois. The rest went into Scottish tartan paper and Joy/Noel/Merry/Bright/hohohos/Please Stop Here! paper. We cut and taped and tied and tagged for hours, on this day-before-the-day-before Christmas.
And we watched movies: Christmas in Connecticut, O Henry’s Full House (including “The Gift of the Maji,” Polar Express, A Christmas Story, and Home Alone. For breakfast Margaret made us salmon with garlic and broccoli. Perfectly prepared!
We’ve rarely been privileged to spend December 23 like this, with enough tasks finished to feel safe, and enough left to do to keep us from being bored. Today our family of Tomitas will descend on us at 2 pm for appetizers, stockings and the Pull the Kleenex game; then we’ll go to candlelight church at Grace across the street at 5. After the candles we’ll drive by the crazy, endless, somehow beautiful Christmas lights in the neighborhood behind our apartment. And go early to bed. Of course, it’s Christmas Eve!
Our car needs a little repair, and I hope it’s drivable this weekend, since I didn’t arrange anything yet with a body shop. But we don’t have far to go. And I learned a lot from my dad about duct tape and baling wire.
I shall say of him, “You are my father, my God, the Rock, my savior.” Forever I will maintain my kindness toward him, and my covenant with him stands firm.
I have thought of and appreciated my dad so often in the twenty-one years since he died of ALS. I don’t think that makes up for the first twenty-one years of my life, when I listened to him rarely and appreciated what he had to say even less. But in these latter days so much of the way he did things is the way I do things. And I’m confident that in the dark night, traffic all around, hearing that scraping I think must be the plastic backing behind the bumper rubbing on the tire, Dad will show me what to do.
Brothers and sisters, to him who can strengthen you, to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ be glory forever and ever.
(2 Samuel 7, Psalm 89, Romans 16, Luke 1)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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