Happy Christmas

Though it has been in the eighties today, the landscape is sere and brown from previous frosts and freezes. The vegetable garden is lush with broccoli and greens.
This Christmas Eve of this amazing year is to us quite modest. Tonight we packed the traditional stockings that earlier had been laid out on the hearth by four year old Quincy, now soundly asleep after a hearing of 'The Night Before Christmas'. Sox, toothpaste, wood putty, rubber bands, nail polish, a squeaky toy for the dog. No diamond tennis bracelets, no keys to a sports car.
Christmas pulls me back to my early Christian heritage and I love to hear the Nine Lessons and carols beamed from some cathedral or other.
Sixty years ago when I was a small child with an even smaller soprano voice, the midnight mass was a big deal. Those of us in the church choir gathered in the sacristy proudly wearing our freshly starched collars over our scarlet choir robes. Some of us wore our gold crosses we had earned for perfect attendance at choir practice and church services. We were issued our candles, and reminded again by the choir master to heed the important rest in the cantata. We were ready for the processional around the church behind the cross bearer. This was magic to me. The church was dark except for all the candles on the altar and the ones we carried. As we processed to the strains of 'Oh, Come all Ye Faithful', I was amazed to see the packed church this night. I can still smell the candles and the whiff of snow and cold brought in by the churchgoers.
We processed, finally, up the center aisle, by the creche in front of the altar, and took our places in the choir pews.
The mass seemed to take forever as I recall it now. I was thinking that back at my house we had already hung up the stockings, and was Santa already there? We got through the cantata and no one jumped the rest. By the recessional I was so sleepy and glad to jump into my father's arms and be carried home in the snow and put into bed.
I love this legacy from my parents. I grew up and became an agnostic, unable to give my own children and grandchildren any certainty in religious faith. But at Christmas, I shamelessly have all the trappings, mostly secular. I will not be going to any church, but I look up at the bright stars tonight and hope for humankind that we will prevail and care for each other in these hard times.