Christmas Traditions
The words and images of the Christmas season are
today so familiar for so many they often pass unheard and unseen.
This is a season of the celebration of a new life,
a promise. It is also the season of farewells to things of times
past. And it is a time of the particular pain of alienation, implored
to invisibility in the service of good cheer. My choice for Christmas cards became comprehensible. I have no virtue worthy of note. Indeed self-absorption
is my natural state. I make comment to direct attention to the blessing
of whether by force or choice the savor of special joy of human warmth
and closeness in understanding. When I am blessed with celebration of bounty shared with the
beautiful and the competent there still remains a small corner of
loneliness noted, admittedly, sometimes only briefly but always. The Magi worshiped fire and the light. They sought
enlightenment in a new life stridently, from a crib in the hay, proclaiming
divinity. I have found it among those who endure; with grace and joy. 
On this 18th day of December while purchasing materials in order to
attend to one winter tradition, that of putting out food for the wild
birds, I overheard the cliche' "Have a nice holiday" responded to
"I hope I will. I am undergoing surgery for cancer tomorrow." No intrusion
could have been useful. However the memories came in a flood and I
was immediately carried to the most imbued of my personal holiday
traditions, that for so many years of being
with the ill and the alone on those holy days..
The midi is We Three
Kings of Orient Are. Arranger and sequencer unknown.
© December 1995