My Christmas

This year I went to my parents house, where I had lived for some years, and celebrated with my parents and my sister’s family. We exchanged gifts for two hours and then ate a nice dinner prepared by my parents. For a moment I forget that I had grand-nephews and I thought that I saw again my nephews tearing open the packages. After dinner I and my sister washed dishes as in the distant past.

It was a Christmas typical of those in my family and through-out the U.S., but my perception of Christmas, my internal Christmas, has changed slowly over the years.

As a child Christmas seemed a magical time of intense excitement when dreams could come true. I was very happy to receive so many gifts. Then at a certain age I started to see Christmas as a bad thing. It seemed that we were forced to do things that we did not want to do because of a tradition. It also seemed to me that this tradition precluded sincere expression of love because of all of the obligatory symbolic representations of love, the focus on the material, and the tremendous stress involved. Bah Humbug!

Recently I have begun to see some magic creeping back into Christmas. I can see that there is something magical about how I tolerate difficulties in order to spend some time with loved ones. It is still a mystery to me. Does the extra effort required to prepare for Christmas help us to experience love that is always there? Why is love so difficult to see? Perhaps because it is the air that we breath.

I guess I really do not know the ways of the heart so perhaps the best I (mind) can do is to try to stay out of the way. Then the heart will find it’s way in every circumstance.

Perhaps Christmas is the mind’s gift to the heart.