All the Christmas I Need

Christmas on the farm is not a time of lights and joyous singing.  The house is not decorated nor is there mythology surrounding an upcoming gift exchange.  It is cold and the lights are off to save every sliver of energy and money we can.  The chance of our one Bing Crosby Christmas album making it on to the record player at anytime other than our family gathering is very slim.  I received a handful of phone calls from family members encouraging me to go to one place or another to get a tree.  Tradition is a big shackle to shake especially when the intent isn’t to reject tradition but establish new values.

The backyard smells like wet shit.  There really isn’t a better description, and if the word is offensive to you then you probably haven’t heard me talk much because I use it all the time.  Mostly when I stub my toe or watch the Dodgers play.  Wet weather and waterfowl has rendered parts of the backyard into marsh.  It is seasonal, but still a little gross.  A covering of straw mitigates the mud and cuts the smell.  It is there nonetheless.  Heat lamps for the animals have been exchanged for Christmas lights and the yard has an eerie red glow.  The animals are happy and covered in the cold.  We are pleased to be their stewards.

A sucker has been growing in the yard since I can remember.  It is a fir tree that is next to our garden fence.  The fence prevented branches from growing on one side and the tree had never been pruned.  Ethan and I went out in the dark and cut it down.  When we drug it into the house and placed it in the tree stand my grinchish heart cracked slightly.  Ethan took charge of the task of hanging lights and decorating the tree.  Carly and I watched him as we listened to 90’s pop and didn’t utter a single fa la la la la.

Christmas is defined so many ways.  The holiday season with all of the influence of spirituality, tradition, and materialism has rendered the season nearly meaningless to me.  I see our dead garden and our animals huddled together for warmth and I feel the hopelessness of winter and the unrelenting sting of nature.  And then I think of humans and what we have made Christmas.  Society flips a big middle finger to nature with all of our decadence and consumption.  We declare our mastery over the earth in this deep dark winter.  Maybe it is our distraction to make us feel different than nature. 

Maybe we are supposed to go through this dark season along with the rest of Nature.  Perhaps it is a good to take time to not indulge in all that is put in front of us and instead think about what God really is.  If there are no weeds to pull, no soil to prepare, no garden to harvest, then now is the perfect time to reflect.  Now is the time we can think about what God gives us from Creation.  Moreover, now is the time we can think of what God has given us in a supernatural way.

Think of it like this, when Ethan cut down the tree in our yard he changed it.  He took something that Carly and I considered an annoyance; something that kept light from the fruit bearing plants, something that compared to everything else was ugly and he removed it.  He removed it from the cold and the wet shit.  When he saw it he said, this is good enough and then he put lights on it and decorated it and called it his.  Maybe that is all Christmas should be.  Recognizing that a Son selected us, something that is otherwise worthless and told us that we are good enough, taking us into His house and making us His.  That is all the Christmas I need.