True Christmas Story: A Home for Christmas

The Christmas I was eight we were almost homeless and I didn't get any presents. It's one of my happiest memories.

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My parents had been unemployed for a long time, and it didn't look like that was going to change any time soon, so my father decided to go back to school. We were in New Hampshire and Wheaton College was in Illinois, so we packed the van and headed west. We'd stay with friends until we found an apartment.

The drive out there was three days of fun. We took turns reading a book aloud (probably from either The Chronicles of Narnia or The Lord of the Rings), worked puzzle books, ate yummy snacks we never got at home, and watched my cat explore the packed van. My parents had a homemade mattress in the back, on a plywood platform with our household stuff underneath. They slept on that at night and took turns driving during the day. I guess my brother and I must have slept in the seats, but I don't remember. We were both small for our ages, and he was twelve. The van broke down once, and we sat in the breakdown lane for a while, but of course somebody got it going again.

Finding jobs and an apartment took a lot longer than my parents had anticipated, and with Christmas approaching they were starting to feel very much in the way in our friends' house. I was shocked when one of our hosts replied to my mother's 'thank you' with "It's the least we can do." I had thought these were generous people and close friends of my parents, and now it turned out they were only doing the least they could.

My mother did manage to find a job, and my brother and I went out every day with my father to look for a place to live. And that's how we met Preston.

Preston was cheerful and southern and he showed us around the apartment like we were old friends. He was the handyman, not the landlord, but he didn't see any sense in keeping us waiting while his boss was on her way over.

When "Mizz Norris" did arrive, she told my father that someone else was coming to see the apartment, and she had to give him priority because he had applied first.

"Don't make no difference nohow," Preston objected, looking at my father. "I rented it to him."

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Preston got his way and Mrs. Norris produced a rental agreement, with the printed ban on cats crossed out before we could even bring up the subject.

We moved in on Christmas Eve. My brother and I got our own rooms, even though mine was small and didn't really have a proper door, and my parents put their homemade mattress in the living room.

We'd brought a plywood storage box, five feet long and two and a half feet long and lined with wallpaper samples, and that first day it was sitting on its end in the living room. To me it was magic just waiting to happen. I put a festive tablecloth in the bottom, a small lamp in the back and a scrap of red plexiglass in front of the lamp, and in front of that, the little porcelain nativity scene my mother had gotten from her mother.

That night we turned the rest of the lights off and sat in the festive red glow. My father read the Christmas story from his Bible with a flashlight and we sang carols.

4 Short Stories for Christmas

A few Christmas stories you may enjoy:

"A Visit from Saint Dominick" by Ray Flynt

"Here Comes Santa Claus" by Bill Pronzini

"Silent Night" by Marcia Muller

"The Three Travelers" by Edward D. Hoch

Merry Christmas!

Merry Un-Christmas!

This one's for everyone who doesn't celebrate Christmas. I know there are a lot of you. Some of you celebrate something else instead, while some just don't do the whole winter-holiday thing.

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Some of my Christian friends would want me to try to pull you in. They'd want me to talk about Christmas this week, and nothing but Christmas. They're among those shoppers you hear in supermarkets, replying to a cheerful greeting of "Happy Holidays" with an indignant "Merry CHRISTMAS!" I love them, but when I hear that, I cringe, for two reasons:

First, no matter how strongly someone believes in Christmas, yelling at a store clerk like a petulant child probably, I'm guessing, isn't going to help the cause.

Second, there's nothing in the Christian Bible designating late December as Christmas. In fact, it puts the date of Jesus' birth much earlier in the year and never mentions anything about observing a holiday for it. Christmas is pure tradition, stemming from a European cultural background in solstice holidays and the desire of many Christians to celebrate one of the pivotal events of our history. There's no more basis in the Bible or in logic for insisting on "Merry Christmas!" in late December than there would be for yelling "Jolly Dove Day!" every August, in celebration of the day Noah released a dove from the ark in search of dry land after the great flood.

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But in a broader sense, we all celebrate together. If you live in the northern quarter of the planet, this week is when the days finally stop getting shorter and start getting longer again. It's a physical reminder of something we can make real in our own lives and relationships: the theme of renewal, of new light and the hope of new life.

With that in mind, no matter where you live and what you celebrate or don't celebrate, I'd like to wish you a joyful and life-renewing solstice season.

Hiding Behind the Christmas Tree

Decembers are so predictable: holiday cheer and holiday blues, perky music and glitzy decorations and the pursuit of the 'true meaning of Christmas'. And of course in the background, day after grinding day, the bad news doesn't stop just because it's December. With bombings in Aleppo, rockets landing on Beersheba and alleged mass murders in Colombia, the headlines read like the sickest kind of ABC book.

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But then one day - last Friday to be exact - Americans took notice. People who didn't seem to care on December 13th about thousands killed in Syria or tens of thousands killed in Mexico suddenly reacted on December 14th when 28 were killed in Connecticut. It was, undeniably, a horrific event. It was shocking, gruesome and inconceivable. And so were all the other times people were shot to death, bombed to death, starved or crushed or raped or tortured in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Haiti, Mali and elsewhere - including, of course, other locations in the United States.

I'm deeply disturbed by the Sandy Hook massacre, as I'm deeply disturbed by every instance of violence I hear about. But what disturbs me much more is the reaction I'm seeing - or, I should say, the lack of reaction. When on Friday my Facebook and Twitter feeds erupted with comments about violence after months of silence on the subject, and Google put a memorial candle on its search page where none had been the day before, I had to face a terrible truth. These people were not, as I had thought, deeply pained every day by the preventable suffering and pointless loss of life that never stops. They were not freshly goaded to hard work by each new headline. They had been looking the other way.

But hold on; it gets worse. A lot of the comments, thankfully, were attempts to brainstorm for a crowdsourced solution. But a surprising number of people actually appealed to the rest of us not to try to stop the killing. They said they needed us to let them focus on their feelings, and that there would be time for such talk after it was all over. Of course there was no reasoning with them, either, because they weren't interested in reason. They weren't motivated to stop the killing. They wanted to go back to looking the other way.

And then there were the people (I have to assume they meant well) who suggested prayer or "spiritual revival" was the answer. Now if prayer is a method of harnessing some cosmic or mystical power and directing it to accomplish specific goals, and if spiritual revival is an evil-erasing phenomenon we can simply wait for, then of course those are good answers. But the people who suggested these things are Christians. They believe in the Bible. And of course the Bible teaches that prayer without faith is useless, and 'faith' that's not demonstrated in action is nothing but hypocrisy.

Some people, it seems, have religion in their lives like they have Christmas trees in their houses. They display it where you can't help but notice, and it looks beautiful. And maybe it is a beautiful, natural thing, full of life and strength, but they've cut it off from its roots and removed it from its context. They've covered it with a variety of baggage taken from elsewhere, very attractive and eye-catching but cheap and fake on close examination. And there's probably nothing wrong with that. It's a tradition and a pretty one; it can add beauty and a sense of magic to daily life. But it's no substitute for living. It can't replace getting out of the pew and actually doing things and caring about people.

This Christmas season, though I desperately wish the terrible events of last Friday hadn't happened, it's my prayer that through this tragedy many people - especially my fellow Americans - will wake up and choose to look at what's happening to so many human beings just like us all over the world, and will choose to help stop it. If enough of us make that choice, I know we can succeed.

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