Category Archives: Christmas

Remembering Erich

My younger brother, my only sibling, died a little more than a year ago. This will be our second Christmas without him. My brother was a loner and unpredictable so Christmas without him, even when he was alive, was not rare, but this year feels different. When you love someone, even if you don’t always enjoy their company when they are around, knowing they are safe somewhere in the world is a comfort. My brother’s existence seemed less and less safe as the years went by, certainly in the last few years when he had physically moved a thousand miles away and was living in his van, but he kept in touch with my mother by phone, often daily. I didn’t always believe or trust in the news he shared with her about his life. My brother’s narratives often strayed from reality, and I never knew how much he believed of his own tales. Toward the end of his life I would have liked more than anything to know how much he believed himself of what he spun for the rest of us. But that was the one thing you could never really know with him.

My brother was an alcoholic.

He was the smartest person I ever knew, smart enough to observe and draw conclusions about life that most people happily miss. He was smart enough to see that his intelligence, his dyslexia, his six foot seven inch, one hundred ninety pound frame, his poet’s heart and painter’s eye made him an odd stranger in this world. We were eighteen months apart in age, and the children of addicts. That it was my job to pilot my little brother to safe waters seemed clear to me at an early age, but I lost that sense of mission when I started school. While school was a place of safety and belonging for me, it was only ever a danger to my brother. So it became every man for himself in my little family, and that single, unspoken truth wounded him immeasurably. It also, as wounds often do, defined him.

When you love an addict, you always imagine there is a way of helping just within reach, something that you, and maybe only you, can do, or say, or maybe a way of being that will change things. That somehow it lies within your power to make the light snap on. There isn’t of course, but the fact that you believe there is makes you and your addict perfectly suited to one another. My brother found and made his own family as an adult, cobbled together from childhood friends, and like-minded dreamers. He sometimes loved well, and was loved by others along the way, but his wound would not be healed. He died alone. A resilient few people tried hard to keep that from happening, but looking back, I think that is how he had planned it.

Christmas, however, offers an alternate ending to my brother’s story.

Christmas was not his holiday. Too much family. Too much forced cheeriness. Too many ways to disappoint and be disappointed. Christmas is about beginnings, about the hope that comes with beginnings. Christmas, as a holiday on its own, does not have much to recommend itself to broken people, people with wounds, people who have seen more endings than beginnings. But Christmas, as a holiday, doesn’t stand alone. It is encompassed within the story of a larger life, the life of a man who, like my brother was defined by his wounds, left alone by his friends, and homeless. Christmas, as a story, is circumscribed by the story of Good Friday and Easter. The baby grows. The man loves others more than himself. The world sees no use for him. He dies alone.

And then, in the most unimaginable twist, he conquers death, takes back his broken body and walks among us. Christmas introduces us to the One who can truly say, “No one dies alone.”

I think, in the days and hours after we left his side, the days and hours he lay in hospice dying, my brother had a divine appointment with a fellow wanderer. How he responded in those last moments is, for a time, a mystery, but because it is Christmas I can hope.

Still No Room at the Inn

A different kind of Christmas story, but some of the characters feel the same. There’s a fourteen year old girl. She’s not pregnant, but she carries a heavy load. There are shepherds scattered throughout this tale, a high school principal, a guidance counselor, a police officer, keeping watch. Like the original story, a journey must be made, lodging and assistance is required and time is of the essence, but the innkeeper in this story is not a busy, distracted hotelier. It is an overwhelmed and completely impersonal mental health system.

Zero in on the setting for this drama- not a crowded, filthy stable, but an empty, windowless cell in the psychiatric lockdown unit of a suburban ER. No manger for a bed, rather a two inch thick vinyl covered mat on a bare tile floor. There are shepherds here also. They wear military type uniforms. They confiscate and lock up your possessions, show you the stance you are to take as you are “wanded” for contraband, and control the door in and out of the unit, in and out of your cell, a door with no handle on your side. They are just doing their job. Our fourteen year old young lady, scared and confused, bears her load with grace and dignity and waits for help.

Like the stable on that long ago night, the lockdown is crowded. Neighbors arrive on stretchers, in handcuffs, sometimes other restraints. They bring their people, just like our young lady brought you. We make a strange little collective, a collage of humanity, the dazed, the raging, the profane, the apologetic, the apathetic, and the sad. The sensory deprivation of the cell, the brightness of the light, the lack of information about what to expect, what to hope for, tests you.

A bed in one of three in-patient units in the city… that’s what you wait for, but like the original Christmas day, you are in a crowded city teeming with activity. Information is fed to you in little scraps sandwiched between thick slabs of boredom spent waiting for more little scraps until you feel like a lab rat staring at your door, listening to conversations in the hallway, watching the activity that passes by. With no clocks anywhere, time doesn’t pass so much as pause. The challenge for a fourteen year old in such a place is to keep her humor sharpened, to wield it defensively as needed, and sometimes to flatten it like a shield across her heart when the impossible looms.

Unlike our young lady, you are allowed to exit the lockdown and re-enter the larger world. When you do, the contrast is unsettling. It is December and all the world is planning a party. Swags of evergreen and twinkle lights drape the hospital doorways. The halls are swarming with cheerful ladies in green jackets selling cakes, cookies, wreaths. Tables are lined up featuring jewelry, bobbles, handmade crafts from around the world. You can barely navigate through the common areas. Even in the hospital, people are shopping.

A wise man finds his way to our girl’s cell, a pediatrician. He is kind, and gentle, but he cannot provide a bed at an in-patient unit. Another wise man, a psychologist bearing gifts, recommends two books to read when our fourteen year old returns home. He is apologetic that he cannot find a room at the in-patient unit.

A day, a night, a day.

It is Christmas in America, and I am looking everywhere for Jesus.

Maybe Christmas is just a holiday for happy people. Maybe the way we celebrate Christmas, the commotion, the gift buying and giving, the lights, the music, the hype and expectation of it all does nothing to invite the sad, the discouraged, the frightened, the lonely. A crowded church full of joyous, well-dressed people singing familiar songs does not automatically banish the demons that prey on the downtrodden. Nothing about a brightly lit tree or a house full of relatives can fill an empty heart. No gift that comes in a box or a bag will make up for returning home to a broken life at the end of the day.

A fourteen year old wakes up on a December morning and isn’t certain she can make it through the day without hurting herself, but like the young woman in Bethlehem whose baby comes early into an overcrowded world, there is no room at the inn for her. It’s a different kind of Christmas story, but it’s the one I lived this past week.

Why I’m Done with Santa

Let me first say that I am a Christmas freak. I always have been. The lights, the music, the tree, the food and decorations, I can’t get enough of it, and I can’t get it early enough. I am all schmaltzy and chirpy like an elf around Christmas time. I am dementedly chipper about Christmas.

Santa Claus, on the other hand, has been a big disappointment.

I was once all in Santa’s corner. I was a die-hard believer until I was ten, way past when other children had gotten the inside skinny on Santa. I was the dope that dropped my jaw when I overheard the second grade teacher tell her class to remember that the Kindergarteners still believed. I still believed. I was in fifth grade.

For me, finding that Santa was a bust made Christmas a bust. Santa was Christmas. Santa was the magic, the mystery, the faith, the hope of Christmas. He was the possibility that the world could still improve, if only one night a year, while I was sound asleep. Finding that my faith in Santa had been badly misplaced made me lose my faith in everything. After all, who or what could hold a candle to Santa? The Easter Bunny? The Tooth Fairy? Baby Jesus? They were pale imitations to the fat man who wiggled down my chimney once a year to deliver piles of presents and then zipped away into the night on his magical flying reindeer.

Now, as an adult, I can take a critical view of Santa and see that even if he had turned out to be real, he would have been kind of a jerk compared to Jesus. In a celebrity death match, Jesus would take down Santa in the first round. Here’s a breakdown of what the judges might consider.

Santa watches all year and decides if I’ve been Naughty or Nice.

Does this ever work as a behavioral motivation model? 360 days out of the year I would be the same, somewhat selfish, little creep I always was. Then a few days before Christmas I would ramp up my goodness quotient, and VOILA! On Christmas morning I got a heap load of presents. Every year, no matter what. I never got coal. If I had been at all analytical about this, I could have come to only one of two conclusions. Either Santa was a complete moron, or his standard of goodness was just about the same as mine.

Jesus’ standard of goodness incinerates mine. He took one look at my Naughty or Nice list, shook his head, and said “Your only hope for Christmas is if I intervene.” And he did intervene. And now he rips up my list and posts His in my place. Every day. No matter what.

Santa is always jolly.

There’s a reason he only comes to town once a year. One day a year he can pull off the jolly thing for 24 hours. Then he goes back to the North Pole where he does who knows what. Have you ever actually seen Mrs. Claus or the elves? That’s because they’re covered in bruises, and drink to get through the day. Have you ever wondered why Santa lives at the North Pole? Maybe it’s because it can be five o’clock there all day long.

Jesus wept. He got angry and turned over tables. He grew frustrated and disappointed. He was tired, and sometimes he snapped at people. He spoke truth to power, but remained silent when no good came of speaking. He was whipped with barbs until his skin fell off, then he was nailed onto wooden cross bars, hauled up vertically and left there for gravity to rip his heart apart inside his chest. Jesus was able to forgive all of us while he hung there, and he knew better than to be jolly.

Santa is big and fat and can slide down chimneys.

Santa can slide down your chimney even when you don’t have a chimney. Now there’s a marketable skill. Santa is also greatly beloved as a fat man but hasn’t lifted a finger to help with the self esteem of little fat boys and girls. Santa is an iconic figure, but not a role model. Nobody ever wants to grow up to be like Santa. He’s a fat guy who slides down chimneys for a living.

Jesus was, most likely, gaunt, dark skinned, calloused, weather aged, and had bad teeth. Despite what you might think around Christmas, he was only actually a little baby for the standard amount of time, and lived a much scrutinized life in public for three years. All but one of his best friends chose to be killed rather than stop telling the world about him. The one that lived was banished to a remote island forever. For two thousand years people have been trying to be like him or trying to do away with his influence.

Santa makes pit stops in the home of every child who believes in him, all in one night, and still gets home in time for breakfast.

Sometimes he needs help from NORAD and the local weatherman but still… On the other hand, he’s pretty inconsistent. He leaves much bigger booty for the little rich kids than for the little poor kids, and sometimes, in spite of what his agent and PR people claim, sometimes he just plain forgets or fails to show up at a home. He doesn’t always read his mail very carefully either.

Jesus is much more popular among the poor, the sick, the broken, the abandoned, the forgotten and the evil doers than he is among the rich and powerful and good people. In fact, you pretty much have to get to the point where you realize you are poor, sick, broken, abandoned, forgotten and an evil doer before Jesus will even make an appearance. Jesus is more about thoroughness than speed in getting his work done, and he doesn’t give up on those who are no longer children.

Santa can’t fly, but he is resourceful enough to find some reindeers that can.

But after all these years, has anyone ever actually seen this entourage in the air?

While he was dead, Jesus raised himself from the dead. He appeared to lots of different people, friends and enemies alike. A month after he had been killed, he appeared to four hundred people at one time. Then he disappeared and no one has found his body. People are still talking about it.

Santa is about pretending.

About smiling no matter what, about keeping your eyes closed, about telling yourself what you wish was true. You can only keep that up for so long.

Jesus is about becoming real.

It’s an adventure that only starts with Christmas.