CONSIDERING GIFTS

This week, on the shortest day of the year Dan, Liberty and I were making the drive to American K9 Country, the training facility in Amherst, NY, where Liberty and I take Agility classes each week. It’s an hour and a half drive, but with Christmas only days away the traffic on rt. 93N is light. Dan drives, so I have plenty of time to peer at our fellow commuters in their SUVs and trucks and wonder how their lives have been this year. I’m at an age where friends and relatives are coming down with diseases and dying. I think a lot about mortality and I’ve begun to notice the years speeding past at an increasing rate, especially around the holidays.

When I was a little kid, the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas seem interminable. The night before Christmas, I would lie in my little bed listening to the wind and admiring the glow of Christmas lights shining through my window. I would try hard not to think of our sparkling tree, the special foods my mother had been preparing, Santa and, most of all, the presents. Instead, I would review the Christmas story as told in the Gospels, trying not to think about all the issues I had with it: Mary and Joseph plodding through a hot, sandy desert towards Bethlehem to pay their taxes, sweating and thirsty. I hated hot weather and bugs; deserts were unappealing places to me. In the 1950’s, no one discussed pregnancy, I decided Mary was too big and heavy to ride on that poor little donkey in the pictures I saw in Sunday School. 

By the time Jesus was born the shepherds were already there, standing around. But who was watching their sheep? In the carols we sang, it got really cold and there was even snow, but when the Wise Men finally showed up, only one of them brought something sort of useful: gold (at least now they could pay their taxes.) The other two brought frankincense and myrrh, both some types of perfume, even though Jesus was a boy! I wasn’t too keen on camels, either, having ridden one at the Bronx Zoo. I knew they often bite you and spit. I did like the star and the angel choirs, but the part about everyone having to go home by a different route to avoid being captured by King Herod terrified me. I had read the part about him killing off all the little kids two and under in spite. So, on those last days before December 25th, although I tried to think about the Christmas story, I inevitably ended up falling asleep dreaming of sugar plumbs and presents rather than God’s gift lying in the manger, wrapped in whatever “swaddling clothes” were. 

I’m mostly grown up now and the winter solstice reminds me that time truly speeds up as the old year (and one’s lifespan) ends. Although over two-thousand years have passed since that birth, the Middle East is still a dangerous place for children. This year, Bethlehem, itself, is closed to tourists due to the on-going war between Hamas and Israel. Herod, himself, would be surprised at all the children under two years of age who continue to be murdered, both Jewish and Palestinian.

These last few nights before Christmas, I will lie in bed and think of the Christmas story, but I will also think about gifts. I will say a prayer of thanks to the two individuals whose deaths and subsequent gifts of their corneas allow me to see the faces in the cars as well as those of the people I love. May everyone’s days, regardless of their length, be merry and bright, and thoughtful and kind.