December 25, 2020
It's been just the two of us today, and right now is the first time I've opened the laptop since last night. Aside from a few peeks at Twitter, I have let the world turn without me. It's been as good a rest as a vacation, and I will continue to take the night off, go to bed early, and take up my pen (or pixels, I guess) again tomorrow.
I'm one of the lucky ones this year, with a roof over my head, good food on the table, my family safe. I miss my children, my brothers and sisters, and my friends-- all isolated because of the pandemic-- but am very aware that I am blessed.
It has not always been this way.
For those struggling this holiday season, I am thinking of you. A reminder, if anything can help in these dark times, that Christmas marks the time when the light starts to come back.
I am now 65 and have lived alone for a number of years. So I started this tradition of inviting fellow "holiday orphans" over for a bang-up home-cooked dinner at Thanksgiving and Christmas, which helped alleviate the heartache, and we had wonderful times. You might be surprised by how many of us "holiday orphans" there are. At my dinners, there is only one rule: do not mention why you are a holiday orphan . Because it absolutely does not matter. And we have a blast. I set a very pretty table with my French great-grandmother's ironed and starched table linens and gigantic napkins, my heirloom French china, crystal and silver, and then I lay out a feast. But we couldn't do that this year. How I look forward to 2021, a new year after this annus horribilis, with that orange-faced monstrosity gone from the White House, sanity restored, and vaccines on the way!
On this Christmas night, I feel an opportunity to reflect on how this ‘richest country in the history of the world’ can have so many citizens who are hungry, homeless, jobless, and in want of basic necessities. I feel it appropriate to question our assumptions, about free market capitalism, corporations, rugged individualism and materialism.
This holiday, so basic to our society, has little to do with the birth of the baby Jesus. May we also question the basic story of our civilization, the magic birth of an infant, said to be the child of God, who lives in the sky and offers salvation after death. But only to humans who believe in this tale.