Christmas doesn’t just begin and end for me.
It creeps in, softly at first, barely noticeable, and then grows larger, more present.
It’s a gentle presence — despite the noise and clang blaring from the TV set urging us to buy more, spend more, listen to jingle bells one more time every station break.
Fortunately I don’t watch much TV. My wife has some favorite shows and I watch football. Not as much as I used to, and that’s a good thing, but maybe a game or two a week if the excitement of the game exceeds my irritation threshold with the incessant commercials. The athleticism on display and the tenor of the game had better be good — real good — or I’m done.
Rather than sit still and ingest what networks force down our throats we’re more likely, at our house, to plug in a DVD or dial up something on a subscription service that we choose to watch.
I love music. And every year I start with a couple of favorite Christmas CD’s from a collection that would seem to others, but not to me, unwieldy and excessive.
But if I want to listen to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio or Handel’s Messiah, or listen to Kathy Mattea sing “Mary Did You Know,” or if the grandkids are over and want to giggle along with the Chipmunks squealing their way through “Here Comes Santa Claus” I have all of it ready at hand.
We don’t have a piano but we can sing. A few days ago I pulled out the guitar and a houseful of grandkids and their friends sang what was originally called The Guitar Carol, written in haste by a young church organist whose organ broke down, and he had to come up with something fast that the congregation could sing. The kids didn’t know the story until I told them, but when I started to play they all joined in, their soft young voices filling the living room with “Silent Night.”
The glow of Christmas ramped up for me then. We spent that evening watching them tour the village shops of a make-believe Bethlehem. And the day after we watched and listened to the Bitterroot Community Choir’s annual Christmas Concert.
We saw people that we know — a school custodian, teachers, a dentist’s wife, a lady who works at the bank, a chiropractor, the guy who printed my business cards when I had the fly shop, a physician, a young woman in her middle teens who is talented beyond her years and her mother, standing side-by-side, exalted and inspired as they sang together from Handel’s Messiah — and with them, we were uplifted.
How to feel connected to a community, we felt it. And many of those people came into my life through the doors of my fly shop, or got to know me second-hand through this column. The readership has grown now as the column appears in the Seeley-Swan Pathfinder in addition to the Bitterroot Star.
And the kids who call me Grandpa Chuck — one of them, when he was barely eight, pestered his mother to stop at the fly shop. He had one of those boyhood yearnings, or obsessions, to immerse himself in flies and fly fishing. Mom listened, and accompanied him and three siblings into the shop. The kids were lively, interested, curious about everything, but self-controlled — with just a few quiet directions from mama — and respectful.
And delightful. Before they left each one had tied a fly.
Today their friends join them at our house or on fishing trips. I wouldn’t know any of them if they hadn’t walked into the fly shop that day several years ago.
We’ve attended the Christmas Concert, broken bread and shared life together in the years since. We will get together as we can all through the Christmas season, which for me will last until the snow melts — and I hope long after that.
The echoes of Christmas choirs singing in the vaulted cathedral ceiling of England or sound stages in the new world will linger around our house for at least another month — along with Alabama singing about “Joseph and Mary’s Boy” and other gems from the CD collection.
And the glow and afterglow this year seem somehow warmer, more real, more joyful, peaceful, and loving. Whatever the new year brings, we have community, not in some abstract sociological sense, but with real people that we know and see every day, people who seem to live ordinary lives but who can do extraordinary things with and for each other when they get together. We have family, real family, and family just as real and just as loved as our blood relatives among our friends.
And I hope that the glow — the afterglow of a season that comes alive in our hearts once a year — will last, if we’re so blessed, until next Christmas.
Reader Comments(0)