Wishes for a Merry Christmas 2024

As I noted Saturday, I found my rerun. This originally posted 10 years ago today.

December 24, 2014

As I have traditionally done, for Christmas Day tomorrow my site will be dark in order to leave this post atop the queue. Besides, if you are reading my site on Christmas Day your time is better spent paying attention to your family and friends, for those are the lasting things.

While I wouldn't consider myself a regular and devout churchgoer, last Sunday evening I was in attendance as our humble little church did its Christmas Cantata. Of course it spelled out the story of Christ's birth in words and music, and as the pastor noted afterward good Christian music provides its own sermon and message. Sometimes that's lost when I hear Jingle Bell Rock or Sleigh Bells for the thousandth time in one of the stores in which I do my outside job. Rarely does the rotation include Silent Night or this tune as done by my friends Jim and Michele Hogsett, O Holy Night.

Straight from their dining room, that was. It's one small celebration of the real reason for the season.

(Editor’s note: I posted that from my original on monoblogue with a tear in my eye because Michele was gone by the following Christmas, a victim of breast cancer. She’s truly missed.)

In the runup from Thanksgiving to Christmas 2014, we've seen a lot of senseless tragedy. Unfortunately, much of it was brought about by hatred and evil - hatred over that last few layers of skin which determines its shade or of the belief system one follows, and the evil which justifies taking another's life because of their chosen religion or profession. It's very sad that in the time of season we celebrate life we should be advocating death. Once we stopped a world war to celebrate Christmas, but now... well, peace on earth seems but a quaint saying, and too many consider a successful Christmas as one where they got the biggest presents or threw the best party ever.

In my case, this Christmas will probably provide neither of those worldly goals, but as I grow older I feel that I understand more about what Christmas is supposed to be. I'm not one to be prodded by the force-fed commercialism we now endure into what most consider "Christmas spirit" - in fact, when I was living on my own before I met Kim I didn't even put up a Christmas tree - but in these final days before the holiday I can pause and take stock of the miracle and blessing of Christ's birth and the Earth receiving its King.

So from my rocking chair and laptop in Salisbury, Maryland, (okay, now in the wilds of Laurel, Delaware) I wish you and yours a Merry Christmas. Let's all take stock of what we received in the city of David.