It's been used by many a parent to intimidate their children into being good for at least one month of the year. It's that list, you know, the one immortalized in the song, "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." You know the line: "He's making a list, checking it twice. Gonna find out who's naughty and nice." I never wanted to be on that naughty list. (Warning: Cover your child's ears at this point.) Then I found out there's no such list.
If you made a list of places you might like to be for Christmas, I'm guessing the hospital emergency room wouldn't be on your list. No, mine either. But I was. Yeah, it happened the Christmas that our sons got a new football. It was this extraordinary 60-degree Christmas day. Of course, we had to go out and play with that new ball. I went deep for a pass, and I caught it on the end of my finger! The next thing I knew, I was spending a painful Christmas in the emergency room getting a broken finger repaired. Nice way to spend Christmas, huh?
The Christmas tree has always been a big deal at our house. The boys go on our annual pilgrimage to pick it out. Then we have the annual decorating ceremony, and we're pretty good at it if I do say so myself. The lights, the beautiful decorations you accumulated over the years, the bright star on the top. Our Christmas tree is the center of our family life all during the Christmas season, and then comes January. Yeah, I hate to mention it now, but the decorations come off and the tree comes down. After which, I unceremoniously carry it to the curb for the garbage man to dispose of. The ugly secret is painfully obvious that day. Even though that tree has been glowing with decorations, it was dead all along!
It was the biggest night of the year in a little town called Cornwall. It was the night of the annual Christmas pageant. Since there are no nearby malls or cities to compete with, the pageant is pretty much packed out every year. It's an especially big deal for the children in town. They get to try out for the roles in the Christmas story, and everybody wants a part.
Our family opens our gifts on Christmas Eve, and I've got to tell you, it's usually one amazing outpouring of love. There's not a member of our family who just runs out to some mall and says, "Oh, I've gotta get something for her or for him." No, there seems to be this almost scientific process where with each person they're buying for they say, "Now what do I know about this person? What do they really need? What do they really like?" I think we've even got a couple of sons who evaluate their gift-giving success on the basis of how touched the recipient is. Yeah, they don't mind a few tears actually; it's that touching. And there are always some neat, touching moments at our Christmas Eve.
Like most families, Christmastime for us has always been a season of secrets, mysteries and anticipation. And sometimes even a little frustration. Like the year my wife and I decided to build a dollhouse for our daughter and then another year we built a general store for our son. We closed off the basement and we set up our workshop. The sign on the basement door said, "Closed - Christmas Workshop." But, of course, the kids could hear all the construction sounds downstairs, it's driving them nuts! They begged us to tell them what we were working on. But that, of course, would have ruined everything. Even though it left them wondering, we were building something really nice for them. They just couldn't see it until it was done.
I've checked into many a hotel over the years, but I've never before experienced what I did just a little while back. See, when I arrived, I went to the desk – yes, they had my reservation – and they gave me my room number and my key - so far, we're good - and I went to my room. Then I put the key in the door, opened the door and stopped in my tracks. First hint of trouble was the clothes I saw hanging up on the rack near the door. Then I noticed the TV was on, and there were feet propped on a footrest – feet that were probably attached to someone who was watching that TV. Well, I quickly and quietly closed the door, turned to my associate and said, "What do you know! Someone's in my room!"
One of the amusing sides of Christmas is people shopping in departments they never otherwise shop in - generally clueless. Let me give you an example that I can relate to-men shopping in the ladies clothing department. Oh, we're a mess. Now, if you need a good laugh; you're feeling a little down, you ought to go to the ladies garment department somewhere; especially the more personal the item is, the funnier it is to watch men shopping. They're slightly embarrassed, generally incompetent at what they're doing, and it's very important if you're going to go shopping for a woman during the Christmas season that you get the woman's size: your wife, your mother, your sister, your girlfriend, or whatever. And you trust that the tags are right, of course, on the size. You know that a small had better be a small, because you don't know anything. A large had better be a large. Now, you want to know how to sow some confusion and have some fun? (Don't anybody do this, please.) Imagine if someone snuck into that store late one night and just changed the tags around. Well, people would make a lot of wrong choices, all because the sizes were wrong. Now, that doesn't happen to clothes, but it does happen to people, and it takes the Christmas Story to straighten out small and large.
Our sons worked for many years on an Indian reservation in the Southwest. And they would be one of the few places on that dark reservation where so few people have been reached for Christ who had any Christmas decorations up. But I was always impressed with that one village church where they had a lot of lights outlining all their church buildings, and there was a cross covered with lights on top of the church's steeple. It was pretty impressive. One Christmas I had a chance to visit there and I got to see the lights of the church and that cross. And, man, the cross really stands out against the darkness. And I met Rose. She's a Native woman who attends that church. Those lights are an important part of her story actually. She said, "I have struggled with alcohol for many years. And one night, during the Christmas season, I hit bottom. I was in the pit. I wandered outside and there it was – the cross all lit up in front of me. I came to where the cross was (she said), and with the help of the pastor's wife, I finally found hope that night."
If there was one symbol of the Cold War years and a world divided between Communist and free, it had to be the Berlin Wall, of course. Some of the most dramatic images of the last half of the 20th Century involve that wall - the wall the Communists built to divide East Berlin from democratic West Berlin. There are pictures of the barbed wire along the top of the wall, the armed guards, the people who risked everything to try to escape from behind that wall, and the people who died trying. I think I was like most of the people on this planet to be honest. I mean we pretty much kind of thought that Berlin Wall would always be there. We couldn't imagine how it would ever be taken down. But go to Berlin today. The wall is gone, and it came down almost overnight. The wall we thought would always be there - gone.
