Seeing Past "The Worst Christmas Ever!"

“Worst Christmas Ever!”  It has already been declared.  End of story.  This year's Christmas has failed at its inception.  The epitaph was not given by me of course, the Clark Griswold effigy, but it was so declared by a five year old little boy.  This declaration came about after I told the kids that I needed to stop by a few stores on the way home for Christmas presents for them.  While in a store I remembered that Ronin needed flashlight for a school program.  So I bought him a small cheap flashlight.  Returning to my truck, I threw gifts in the bed where the kids would not see them and I handed Ronin the light he had been requesting for days.  To my surprise, he had a total and complete five year old meltdown!  Through his tears he lamented, “This is the worst Christmas ever!”  It took me a second to realize his five year old brain perceived that this flashlight was his sole Christmas gift. Total first-world problem.  Obviously Ronin would not have fared well as a Who in Whoville waking up with all gifts missing and being expect to stand in the town square and sing carols.

I will admit that if I woke up Christmas morning and all my gifts were gone, it would have shaken me too.  No so much because  ‘all me booty was purloined by green fellow,’ but perhaps because my expectations did not line up with my reality.  Christmas is a time where the reality of your holiday experience quite often misses that Utopian vision of a “Bing Crosby dancing with Danny F. Kaye” Christmas.  When I dream of Christmas, I picture the snow covered fields, a perfect tree that will fit in my living room, and moments by the fire with the kids drinking cocoa while watching Rankin/Bass Christmas specials (except Rudolph Saves New Year, that one is just creepy).  Yet as I look outside at the brown Christmas next to a Christmas tree decorated primarily by kids under the age of 10, I know that a child will just spill that cocoa on the coffee table (ironic) while complaining that the claymation of my beloved Christmas specials stinks.  Expectation, let me introduce you to Reality. 

Yet a wise man once said that sometimes in life we become so focused on the finish line that we fail to find joy in the journey.  So it is with Christmas.  Are we so focused on looking to the end game of the perfect tree, the perfect Christmas party, the perfect gift that we miss the extraordinary beauty of the imperfect moments that surround us every moment of the day if we but only look? In finding this peace and beauty in the moment lies the true spirit of Christmas. 

Do you want the perfect tree...

...or the tree decorated by the perfect child? 

...or even decorated by the imperfect flashlight hating child?

Can we see past the snowless brown-Christmas to notice a yellow and purple and red Christmas? 

Should it matter more that your Christmas candy looks like southbound remnants of a north bound mammal on a high fiber diet...

...with some major clean up...

...or should it matter more that a 9 year old proudly made the candy by herself and then got to share her triumph with her friends?

Should we dwell on the fact that we feel obligated to buy that gift for that not-so-special someone on your list, or should we revel in the experience of truly selfless gift giving?  In all of this, the events are the same, but it is our perspective and attitude that is different.  It is the true spirit of Christmas living within us.

Last Christmas was particularly rough for me.  I recall an evening when I found myself all alone in an empty house.  I felt much like that vacant house and Christmas seemed as far away as my family.  As I sat on the edge of my bed, there was no Christmas for me.  At that moment I happened to turn on my computer and found this video on my home page and discovered Christmas again all alone in the dark.

In that low and terribly imperfect moment, I was reminded of and experienced the true beauty of Christmas.  The season and the moment was bright and hopeful again.  Yet, nothing had changed.  I was still alone in a dark house.  But perhaps what I was looking for had changed.  I found that connection to the deeper meaning of Christmas and the 'worst Christmas every' can never exist in the light of a true Christmas - Just ask the Brits and the German who crawled from their trenches in 1914 to celebrate with men who were trying to kill them mere hours before.

So this is the challenge of Christmas; to pause in the moment; to find its beauty; then revel in it.  It is there because it is inside of each of us.  We need only look past the imperfections created by our own false expectation and find that flame of peace, hope, and love that permeates all of God's creation, especially in the season when we celebrate the birth of his most perfect one.