True confession: I have stopped "making Christmas." All those years as a priest and single mom, making Christmas for a congregation while trying to make up to my son his lack of the Hallmark Christmas family home, I figure I've done my time.
Christmas came the year it came sandwiched between the funerals of my father-in-law and my stepfather. We almost didn't buy a tree that year, since the time between the flights to California and to Utah was so short. But we reconsidered. On the 23rd we bought the last one in the lot, a pile of needles by the time it was decorated, no lights that year for fear of fire.
Christmas came the year I spent it alone after dropping my preschooler off at his father's.
Christmas came the year we ended up in the ditch on the way to church eighty-five icy miles away, and the whole congregation was glad that services were cancelled because they didn't feel safe crossing town.
Christmas came the morning after thieves broke into our house. They stole a laptop and my wife's heirloom jewelry. A handprint on a wall revealed that they had peered into where we lay sleeping with an open bedroom door. While we stood in line at the police station, waiting to file our report, we heard the lady in front of us say, They told me to come here to claim the body.
I think that one was my worst.
That afternoon I said mass for a motley gathering of ex-patriots in my sister's bar in Costa Rica. Somebody was nursing a beer in the back.
And Christmas came.
And they all were holy. Honestly, I think these Christmases revealed more about the miracle of the Incarnation than those occasional ones when the tree was decorated on time and we sat around in our jammies with hot cocoa and cookies for breakfast.
Because our worst Christmases are the world into which God decided to be born, vulnerable to all the worst the world could and would throw at this precious child, poverty, homelessness, exile, foreign occupation, torture, and death.
This child makes it all holy.
We grieve this year with the families of 1,725,000 people worldwide who have died of COVID. We grieve with the families of 323,000 who have died in the United States. We grieve for over 1700 health care workers in the US who died of COVID while people claimed they were faking the seriousness of the virus to make more money.
We grieve for prisoners, for the homeless, for refugees, for the unemployed. We grieve for parents who worry about their children and for children who miss their grandparents.
These are the ones for whom he came. This is the world that he makes holy.
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