The Glorious Christmas Mess
One of the most glorious messes in the world is the mess created in the living room on Christmas Day. Don’t clean it up too quickly. — Andy Rooney
Mamacita says: Well, it’s over. The kids are gone again, and I’m left with the Christmas mess. I both love and hate it.
I love it because it’s the Christmas mess, and it represents family and togetherness and fun, and it’s wadded giftwrap and bits of ribbon and shredded styrofoam and SLABS of styrofoam and empty boxes and funny-shaped pieces of cardboard and candy wrappers. It’s little (and big) pieces of cellophane, invisible on the carpet unless the light is juuuuust right. One can also find those by slipping on them and nearly (or actually) falling on one’s large butt. It’s those metallic gold coin wrappers that the kids kick under the furniture. I am still finding those in midsummer. It’s tissue paper and tags and napkins with Coke rings on them beside all the chairs in the living room. It’s bubble wrap under the dining room table (my feet love that!) and it’s the third dishwasher load in four hours. What a mess. I love it.
I hate it because the Christmas mess means the Christmas fun is over.
My children have left my home and gone home. I’m not sure I will ever get used to my kids talking about “home,” and having it NOT be my house any more.
It’s always (okay, ‘usually’) hard to say goodbye to my kids. I kissed them and hugged them and told them I loved them. I loaded them up with clean laundry and pie and leftovers. They’ve got parties to go to later tonight. They got in the car and drove away.
The house is very quiet and peaceful now, but that’s not how I like to live. Quiet homes are overrated. I’d rather have activity and laughter and chaos.
I am not ready for Christmas to be over. Then again, I am never ready for Christmas to be over.
You surly curmudgeons who hate Christmas and can’t wait for it to end: You ain’t right in the head. I mean it. There is something missing inside of you – something vital and necessary and wonderful
You can get it back if you really want to.
And if you don’t want to, let me repeat: You ain’t right in the head.
It’s Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer!
Mamacita says: Ebenezer and Dick had a boss who understood good business, because good business treats its employees like gold. Charles Dickens’ Fezziwig embodies the good boss who runs a good business. I really don’t know how anyone could ever say it better than Charles Dickens, unless it was Ma Ingalls, who assured Laura and Mary that if everyone wanted everyone else to be happy all the time, then every day would be Christmas. I believe this to be absolutely true.
Haven’t you noticed by now that almost every time you hope and wish and strive for someone else’s happiness, you end up happier yourself? Sometimes, not getting what we wanted for Christmas means we get something else that’s even better. As far as I’m concerned, helping and watching others get what THEY wanted is the best part of the season. Old Fezziwig embodied Christmas far more than any church or dressed-up family or lifeless sermon or decorated mall or a store that stays open on Christmas Day or stressed-out parent or pageants or showy concerts or majestic decorations. Pomp and circumstance are not Christmas. Old Fezziwig understood. Old Fezziwig was a living sermon that really meant something.
Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig dancing at their staff party.
It disgusts me out every pore of my very large body bothers me when people keep Christmas contained in a house or – far worse – in a church. Dressing up and hanging out with other dressed-up people all of whom are going home to near-opulence, comparatively speaking, and feeling justified and holy because they went through the motions and recited the words without actually doing anything about them really doesn’t seem like Christmas proper to me. These days, a lot of Christmas services are more like recitals and concerts with divas and prima donnas and spotlighted performers than anything spiritual or meaningful. Gold, frankincense and myrrh were meant to be given away, not draped around the church. How many of those overdressed bedecked people plan to do anything for anyone but themselves this Christmas? I am not impressed by glitzy ceremony and diva performances at church. A mega-church isn’t a church.
This isn’t a church. It’s a vulgar show.
I am also disgusted that the very places that most need volunteers and donations are near capacity with the needy, and extremely short-handed with the volunteers on church nights. Shouldn’t those be the very times the most people gather together to DO for others, not just sit around and talk about it?
Preaching to the choir only reassures and reaffirms already-held thoughts and beliefs. Festooning a church with expensive fake greenery and shiny things seems an outrageous use of money that would be better spent supplying a soup kitchen or providing Christmas for several families in the area. On Christmas, why not shut the church’s door and send the church’s people out to actually, physically, help real people in their own areas who are in desperate need?
If all you did this season was decorate, purchase, bake, dress up, party, sing/play/work/plan only at/for church, or sit at home relaxing in front of the TV, shame on you. Next year, try to do better than that. Next year, don’t dress up and head for the mall or the church (unless it’s headquarters for the donations which you are going to help distribute); bundle up and get out there and make Christmas really happen for people who might not know what you’ve known for years. Don’t preach to them; let your actions do that for you. Action, people, not words. Words can be empty. Words ARE empty without accompanying action.
If your church’s Christmas focuses on the shop window glitter, performance, and in-house words/deeds/actions, maybe it’s time to seek a real church – one that has substance behind the glowing windows: a church that encourages its worshipers to walk out of the church and into the lives of the people.
Words are cheap. Action takes effort. Without the effort, Christmas isn’t the only meaningless thing in people’s lives.
Seriously. If your church doesn’t know the names of almost every person in its immediate neighborhood, what good is it? What good is it if it concentrates on sending packages and money overseas and ignores the needy right across the street?
It’s better to do a kindness at home than go afar to burn incense. –Chinese proverb
Heh. She said “dick.”
Quotation Saturday: The Magic that is Christmas
. . . because Christmas IS a magical time.
Mamacita says: I love these days leading up to Christmas more than any other time of the year. I love the planning. I love the baking. I love the making lists. I love the shopping, which I actually do all year long. I love the Amazon super-secret-discount-deals. I love wrapping the boxes and decorating them with ribbons and glittery things. I love the Christmas cd’s in my stereo. I love getting out and using the Christmas plates and bowls and glasses. I love making my house look like a Christmas card. I love welcoming people into my home and sharing everything I have with them. I love watching Christmas movies, which I’m doing today, in fact; welcome to my Dickens’ A Christmas Carol marathon – updates Twittered regularly. I know the book by heart, thanks to my father, and I’m quite critical of any movie version that takes too many liberties. Any liberties, actually. I mean, why diddle with perfection? (Stupid scriptwriting doodlers. . . .)
Still the best Christmas story ever written. (fiction)
#25 is my favorite. I think of it regularly. It reminds me of my father, before the diabetes made him. . . different. He used to read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol aloud to us when we were really little. I loved it. I loved the big words, and the three ghosts, and the lessons learned. Dad would explain what the big words meant so next time we would understand the story even better. We did, too. “What is a doornail, Daddy, and how could it be dead?” I loved hearing Dad read out loud. He used to do it a lot when we were little.
Dad loved Christmas more than any little kid ever could. He could shake a package and guess what was in it, and most of the time he was right. He used to lie on the floor and just gaze at the tree. His own childhood was pretty bleak; maybe that was why he threw himself into Christmas for his children so thoroughly. The reading aloud might have been my favorite part.
1. There’s nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child. — Erma Bombeck
2. This is the message of Christmas: We are never alone. — Taylor Caldwell
3. Remember, if Christmas isn’t found in your heart, you won’t find it under a tree. — Charlotte Carpenter.
4. Unless we make Christmas an occasion to share our blessings, all the snow in Alaska won’t make it ‘white’. — Bing Crosby
5. Christmas, my child, is love in action. — Dale Evans
6. My first copies of Treasure Island and Huckleberry Finn still have some blue-spruce needles scattered in the pages. They smell of Christmas still. — Charlton Heston
Every ornament contains magic and memories.
7. My idea of Christmas, whether old-fashioned or modern, is very simple: loving others. Come to think of it, why do we have to wait for Christmas to do that? — Bob Hope
8. The joy of brightening other lives, bearing each others’ burdens, easing other’s loads and supplanting empty hearts and lives with generous gifts becomes for us the magic of Christmas.
— W. C. Jones
9. Christmas gift suggestions: To your enemy, forgiveness. To an opponent, tolerance. To a friend, your heart. To a customer, service. To all, charity. To every child, a good example. To yourself, respect. — Oren Arnold
10. The perfect Christmas tree? All Christmas trees are perfect! — Charles N. Barnard
Even the sad Charlie Brown tree was perfect in his eyes.
11. Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love. — Hamilton Wright Mabie
12. Christmas is a necessity. There has to be at least one day of the year to remind us that we’re here for something else besides ourselves. — Eric Sevareid
13. Christmas, children, is not a date. It is a state of mind. — Mary Ellen Chase
The best day of the year!
14. There has been only one Christmas – the rest are anniversaries. — W.J. Cameron
15. Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time. — Laura Ingalls Wilder
16. Instead of being a time of unusual behavior, Christmas is perhaps the only time in the year when people can obey their natural impulses and express their true sentiments without feeling self-conscious and, perhaps, foolish. Christmas, in short, is about the only chance a man has to be himself. — Francis C. Farley
17. Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen. — Author unknown, attributed to a 7-year-old named Bobby
Open us! Open us now! (bursting with magic!)
18. In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it ‘Christmas’ and went to church; the Jews called it ‘Hanukkah’ and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say ‘Merry Christmas!’ or ‘Happy Hanukkah!’ or (to the atheists) ‘Look out for the wall!’ — Dave Barry
19. When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs? — G.K. Chesterton
20. The message of Christmas is that the visible material world is bound to the invisible spiritual world. — Author Unknown
21. The Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot have a nativity scene in Washington, D.C. This wasn’t for any religious reasons. They couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin. — Jay Leno
22. The earth has grown old with its burden of care, but at Christmas it always is young. — Phillips Brooks
23. Nothing’s as mean as giving a little child something useful for Christmas. — Kin Hubbard
Are you kidding? Socks for Christmas?
24. Christmas – that magic blanket that wraps itself about us, that something so intangible that it is like a fragrance. It may weave a spell of nostalgia. Christmas may be a day of feasting, or of prayer, but always it will be a day of remembrance – a day in which we think of everything we have ever loved. — Augusta E. Rundel
25. There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say, Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round — apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that — as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it! — Charles Dickens
I say God bless it, too. God bless all of you, too. Every one.
