During my entire childhood in the yellow house on West Curtice Street, putting up the Christmas tree was a miserable experience.
It never seemed to fit into the stand without a battle involving saws, sawdust and spilled water on the living room carpet; the large-bulb multi-colored lights took forever to untangle; my brother and I were frantic with excitement and fighting about who got to do what first, and my dad had had a few beers.
Knowing how things always turned out, my hovering mother was nervous, waiting for the first explosion. It usually came when my dad started the lecture about who the heck had put the lights away like this. Never a patient man, it only got worse as burned-out bulbs were discovered: “I bought a ton of these last year—where the hell are they?” he would bellow. “They’re in the box right in front of you,” my mom sighed, in the defeated voice that hurt me inside.
After the lights were on the tree (each bulb anchored to the evergreen with its own piece of string – “You do a job right”), my dad stomped off to bed, for he was a working man who was up each day at five. The rest of us, subdued and joyless now, quietly hung the ornaments.
For a long time, I was embarrassed that our tree –trimming ritual was not like that of other families I imagined. But one of the worst things we can do is engage in constant comparison. Not only comparing our unsatisfactory life to the seemingly enviable lives of others, but also measuring present circumstances to how we imagine things should be or could have been, and of course, wondering if we are “living up to our potential”
Our comparisons are faulty because we seldom have the whole picture. Wildly rich celebrities crash and burn; successful men reach a certain age and regret the decisions that made them successful; brilliant artists jump off bridges. My neighborhood in West St. Paul was far from a tranquil Mayberry. My whiskey-loving neighbor sent my brother and me running for cover when he roared at us across the back fence, and my mother’s beloved neighbor Violet died at age 50 of a disease that, had she lived now, could have been treated — the same disease struck me four years ago.
The thing is, comparing deflects gratitude for what we have now, in this moment. Envy, failure, not measuring up to one standard or another, worry about the uncontrollable future – all clog up our minds and hearts, and dull our vision for what is in staring us in the face.
Pondering things in the bright light of the Christmas Star – sometimes over many years – can bring us a more complete picture and, subsequently, one of the greatest of Christmas gifts: the beginning of forgiveness — of each other, of our families, of ourselves, maybe even of God.
God bless us, every one, with overwhelming gratitude, for what is, what was, and what is yet to be.
Barbara
For more on forgiveness please see this fabulous poem: www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175758
epistlesandepiphanies 