Home for Christmas

 

It’s all about belonging.

There’s something about Christmas which makes us yearn for togetherness. We really have this idyllic picture of family gathered around the tree opening gifts or gathered at the family table, eating turkey, laughing, getting caught up on time missed. It's strange, though, that the perfect family Christmas celebrations we idealize may not always be the ones we remember. The time we can’t make it home—or when a loved one wasn’t there with us—might be the times which we’ll recall as being the most profound. Wasn’t that first Christmas all about a family far from home?

Although it was over forty years ago now, I have indelible memories of my first Christmas away from home and family. It was 1982, the year I left sunny southern California to attend grad school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. To say I was an impoverished student would be embarrassingly accurate. I had a job teaching undergraduates in my department, a gig which paid just enough, after the UW deducted a third of each semester’s tuition, to cover my rent on a 10 X 20-foot studio apartment. I shared the bathroom with the girl next door and the rest of the flat with an army of cockroaches the landlord never seemed to vanquish in spite of many efforts. After rent, taxes, and tuition, I had fifty bucks left over to see me through the month. Two trips per week to the University Plasma Center (or, as I called it, “The Lugosi Lounge”) to sell my blood plasma at $10 a trip provided just enough cash to buy books and supplies and keep body and soul on speaking terms.

Of course, you might be thinking I could always ask my folks for a bailout if ever my bank account dipped below the horizon. Unfortunately, at that time my dad was out of work, so my parents were just as strapped for cash as I was. They’d promised me an electric typewriter as a Christmas gift, and it was either the typewriter or a trip home. I needed the typewriter, so it looked like I would be spending Christmas with the cockroaches.

Enter my buddy, Rich, my theatre colleague, drinking buddy, and partner in crime (sometimes literally, but that’s another story). I’ve often described him as the Jake to my Elwood and the Ollie to my Stan. We were two natural idiots who could each get into enough trouble on his own, but somehow God or fate or the University of Wisconsin Department of Theatre and Drama managed to throw us together. For reasons Rich chose not to explain—and were none of my gosh-darn business anyway—he was also spending Christmas by himself that year. After I learned there would be no trip home for me, Rich suggested we have Christmas dinner together.

 “Christmas Day or Christmas Eve?” he asked.

“Christmas Day,” I told him. “I’ll be in church on Christmas Eve at the late mass at Luther Memorial. I should probably be sober when I go.”

In the weeks leading up to Christmas Rich and I made plans for our holiday repast. We knew two of us couldn’t handle an entire turkey (although neither of us are particularly picky eaters!) and chicken didn’t seem piquant enough to match the felicitous nature of this holy day. We decided the perfect fowl (in the absence of a goose) would be a duck. I had never eaten duck before, and as far as I can recall, have never had it since. What wine goes best with duck, you ask? Who knows? We washed down our Christmas dinner with a six pack of Heilemann’s Olde Style Beer.

I had just enough spending cash left over from my last trip to the Plasma Center to buy Rich a small gift. He was working at the time at the local PBS station which had a great library of vintage films. I got him a paperback encyclopedia of film history which, not being able to afford wrapping paper, I wrapped in the December page of a desk blotter calendar bequeathed to me by the last occupant of my desk at the UW. Rich looked a little embarrassed when I presented this gift. “Sorry, Griff,” he said. “I didn’t get anything for you.” I told him that was okay. He was cooking the duck and buying the beer, so I figured we were square.

The week of Christmas Rich asked me, “Were you serious about going to midnight mass on Christmas Eve?”

“Yes,” I told him. “I always go. It wouldn’t be Christmas without going to church. It’s a religious holiday after all.”

Rich looked slightly pensive for a moment and then said, “You mind if I go with you?”

Rich had been raised Catholic and went to Catholic school. I don’t know how much of this early education had taken, but I was pretty certain my raucous companion hadn’t seen the inside of a church in years. Nevertheless, on Christmas Eve the two of us, smartly clad beneath our winter coats in suits and neckties as befitted the sacredness of the occasion, walked down a cold and foggy University Avenue to the massive gothic cathedral-style house of worship that is Luther Memorial Church. Luther Memorial is one of my favorite churches on the planet. I still recall the gorgeous stained-glass windows and the massive altar piece with the image of Christ with arms spread in welcome.

Rich appeared a bit nervous upon crossing the threshold. “I hope this place doesn’t get struck by lightning for letting me in,” he said. The church was dimly lit, and candles glowed on tall stands at the end of every other pew. The 11PM worshipers had gathered early, and a carol sing-along was already well underway in the crowded nave. We found our way to a place near the rear. I began to join in the singing with mighty yuletide zeal and a complete lack of awareness of the appropriate key in which the other congregants were singing—an embarrassing fact of which Rich reminds me to this day.

I don’t remember anything about the service or the pastor’s message, but I remember how beautiful the old church looked in the twinkling candlelight, the smell of the freshly cut evergreens on the windowsills, the white lights on the twin Christmas trees. I remember how right it felt to be there.

When the service was over at midnight, Rich and I walked back through the fog. My friend was uncharacteristically silent, and he led me to believe something very private and profound was going on inside. “It’s strange,” he said at last, “how it all comes back. All the words of the songs, all the prayers, all the creeds. It all comes back.” We walked on in silence.

Looking back, I like to think I really wasn’t away from family that Christmas. My companion in bacchanalia was also my brother in Christ.

That new little family in the stable in Bethlehem wasn’t alone either. They may have been far from familiar loved ones and their home in Nazareth, but God provided an army of relatives to join them and rejoice in the birth of that little boy. The shepherds were just as delighted to see that infant as if he had been their own child or grandson or nephew. I like to imagine some shepherdess, some woman who had given birth many times before, might’ve taken motherly care of young Mary and held and rocked little Jesus while Mary rested. Maybe someone offered that family a little loaf of bread or a skin of drinking water. Maybe the gathering in that cave—a cave meant as a pen for animals—was really a family homecoming.

Look around you on Christmas Eve. There may be people you’ve known for years or people you’ve never seen before, but they have all come to worship that little baby laid to sleep in an animal’s feeding trough. That little baby is Emmanuel—God with us. All of us. We are a family united by our need for His grace and love, saved by his sacrifice for us, and wherever and whenever we come together in our love of Him, we are home. We belong.

Merry Christmas, my friend. May the peace of God which passes our understanding keep your heart and your mind in Christ Jesus.