Waiting Again

We’ve entered the Christmas season, and I have been thinking about when I first suspected that the jolly man in the red suit who somehow, in time travel unlike anything we’ve been able to document thus far, delivers gifts worldwide in one night, might not be “real,” at least accessible to our five senses. My mother had taken me “to town” to visit Santa at one of the local department stores in my small south Georgia hometown and I had sat on his lap, discussing, I suppose, what I wanted him to bring me for Christmas.

There was something vaguely familiar about Santa that year. Because I adored my grandfather and had spent at least half my waking time following him around before age five (we lived with my grandparents), I had become well-acquainted with the sound of his voice, the contours of his face, the twinkle in his eyes when he looked at me, the bulbous nose that I would learn much later was a symptom of his lifelong alcoholism. On the way home, I leaned up from the back seat of our 1959 Studebaker and said, “Santa looks an awful lot like Daddy.” My biological father had abandoned us before I developed the capacity for memory, so I had hung the familial relationship moniker on him. When no real explanation or protest had come from the front seat, my belief in the man in the red suit had begun to unravel, and with him, the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny.

I had already wondered about a host of other things, too. Like the fact that Santa was supposed to come down the chimney. We had one, but it had been closed in with bricks long before and an unvented gas heater installed in front of it. We still hung our stockings “by the chimney with care,” but on Christmas mornings I saw no evidence that a fat man had squeezed his way in. When I asked about it, I was told that Santa knew about the bricked-up chimney and just came in through the “front door,” which was actually the entrance to the closed-in “front porch,” which we almost never used. In retrospect, I think that was a good answer for a four-year-old—after all, that’s where our presents from Santa were always found on Christmas morning. We always opened our gifts from family on Christmas Eve before we went to bed—a tradition that we still maintain. I have no idea where the tradition came from, but it has worked well to allay tensions, once the next generation appeared and grew up, over how and with whose family the holiday would be celebrated.

I felt torn, too, even then, about the widening chasm between the religious source and icons of the Christian holiday and the cultural practices of the time. My grandmother was the adult Sunday School teacher at the small country church we attended, and each week, she sat at the kitchen table, “getting her lesson” together—diligently reading the Southern Baptist teacher’s guide and a set of commentaries that remained on our bookshelves until long after she was gone. I say that to explain how perhaps more aware I was at five of the “real” Christmas story. We had a set of World Book Encyclopedias and Mama Lois’s Tarbell’s Teacher’s Guides, and a host of bibles, mostly of the King James Version. An avid and early reader, I’d already spent some challenging hours with Old English, trying to “suss out” the meanings of the things I read when I wasn’t out with my grandfather in the garden, across the country road with him in the house in which he slept, or exploring the woods nearby with Spooky, the black cocker spaniel-Spitz mix who would be my first best friend.

My favorite version of the Christmas story was the one in the Gospel According to Luke, no doubt the result of its being the primary source—and structure, I learned only recently—for the Christmas carols we sing at church. I couldn’t get my young head around the fact that Joseph and Mary were so poor that they ended up in a barn stall like the ones that were just across the road on our property and that we celebrated with a decorated tree and colorful packages. No matter how many times I reread the story, Jesus never got a bicycle or a B-B gun or a “Susie Smart” doll or a “Mystery Date” game. There was something, yes, about gold, frankincense, and myrrh, but I was sure I wouldn’t have chosen them from the toys in the Sears or J.C. Penney catalog I perused in the months before, even if they’d been there. I’ve written elsewhere about not being motivated to be good so I could live in a mansion on streets of gold—I suspect that idea derived itself from my skepticism then. I am quite sure, too, as I look back, that it was then that the seeds of my rejection of the idea of God as a wrathful, rejecting parent prone to watching me with a pen in hand and a book in which every misstep would be recorded took form. Reminded me far too much of the guy who’s “making a list, checking it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty and nice.”

Thankfully, in those years, although there was definitely the retail hustle and bustle of buying and wrapping gifts, there was nothing of what we see today. There was still time for those who desired thoughtful reflection—not squeezed into a timeframe—attendance of an afternoon pageant or a Christmas Eve mass planned around whether one could still get to the stores for that one last forgotten gift or home before the turkey was burned to a crisp. There was still time, at least in our house in those days, to consider the true Christmas story, to experience the quiet reverence of it all, even as we watched the twinkle of Christmas lights on the tree. We anticipated the coming of Santa, yes, for the children around us, but the real anticipation was the coming of one who could soothe our ache for peacefulness and show us how to claim it for ourselves.

I was oh, so fortunate to have grown up in the country, where light pollution still doesn’t interfere with a look at the stars. Although there was never snow on Christmas in southern Georgia—there was hardly any snow at all—it didn’t bother me that the scene I saw was unlike many of the covers of Christmas cards that came in the wooden mailbox at the end of the driveway. I’d looked up Israel in the World Book encyclopedia, and it looked mostly like what I saw around me, different flora and fauna aside. Maybe a little more hilly.

I would sit on the concrete back steps of our old farmhouse on stilts and gaze up into the sky, searching for the North Star, the Big Dipper, other constellations I can no longer name from memory, and wonder what the shepherds in the field, the wise men from the East must’ve seen, and marveling that, almost 2,000 years hence, I was looking at that very same sky, those very same stars.

Years passed. I now lived in the Atlanta metro area and I was a practicing psychologist. I had left the “organized” church and, having no children, had no reason to rush to a Christmas pageant or mass. I had still been reduced to shopping for gifts the week before Christmas between 9:00 and 11:00 p.m., when the big-box department stores expanded their hours, because afternoon and evening appointments were always the most in demand.

One of my clients in the early 1980s was a young Jewish woman. In our check-in one December about her thoughts and experiences in the week past, we talked about the season and how hectic it had become. I asked her what she’d thought, growing up, of being out of school for a religious holiday not practiced in her family. She smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “Actually, I love Christmas,” she said. “It may sound crazy, but I intentionally go to the malls at Christmas and shop. The sales are always good. And, then I sit down on a bench somewhere and watch the faces of the Christians crowded at checkout stands, snapping at each other, stressed beyond belief.”

That night, I got into my car to go home. I had stayed late to finish my client notes and close the office, so the traffic on I-285 was light (yes, suburban Atlantans, there once was a time when such a situation was common) and I was alone with my thoughts, remembering what my client had said. I switched on the radio and backed out of my parking place. I tended to avoid stations playing Christmas music in those days, but on this particular night, I decided to leave it tuned to one of the stations that did. The DJ announced Mannheim Steamroller’s Stille Nacht, an arrangement which, although I was aware of the group itself, I had never heard. It continued throughout my drive across the “top” of Atlanta on a clear, dark, starlit night, coming to an end just as I pulled into my driveway.

As the last bars of the recording faded, from somewhere deep within me rose a grief at the loss of the reverence of Christmas, the hopefulness for a new year that would be less stressful for me and those I loved, the promise that the kingdom of heaven, in which people treated each other with respect, where justice prevailed and forgiveness was offered and accepted when one violated the boundaries of another, where loving one’s neighbor as oneself was a matter of everyday principle and neighbors were simply those who showed others mercy—was just a thin veil away. I sat in my car and wept.

It’s been almost 30 years since I stopped practicing psychology. Today, I live in Asheville, N.C., where the skies are sometimes as dark as they were in south Georgia so long ago. The passing years have taught me that no matter what, each year will always bring something that will delight, something to celebrate, something to be proud of. But each year will also always bring something to grieve, something to fear, something to repent.

I still weep…and wait. And I still hope. And, on silent nights, I once again look up at dark starlit skies and wonder.