Twinkle, Twinkle...

(with apologies to those who have already read this one...)

She was 4, a pixie-child with short hair, half curly and half straight.  She climbed up on the chair, pushed her glasses up on her nose, took a deep breath, and began to sing:

    Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are

    Way up in the sky so high, like a diamond in the sky

    Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are

    Way up in the sky so high, like a diamond in the sky

    Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are

    Way up in the sky so high, like a diamond in the sky

    Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are

    Way up in the sky so high, like a diamond in the sky

    Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are…

 

      The rest of her family was gathered around for the concert, waiting to clap.  We’d had the Twinkle, piano version, cello version, and probably teenage mutant ninja turtle version...and the vocal version was the climax.  Then, and only then, could we get to opening Christmas Eve presents.  The nightmare began when the song would not end.  Every time the song should have ended, it just circled back on itself and started again.  The child’s face began to reflect concern, then consternation, then crisis.  She could not escape the twinkles.

     Ultimately, the giggles and guffaws from a loving family gave way to singing together the final line tune and ending the concert.  Presents were opened and eyes were closed at the end of a long Christmas Eve.  But every time I hear the Twinkle song, I think back to that most significant twinkling star.

     There we are, thinking we could sing our songs and save our souls, and as we try over and over to get out of the mess, we just get in deeper and deeper.  No matter how hard we try or how simple it would seem to be, we cannot escape the repetition of our sinful nature.

    So we look to the Star and we celebrate joining the heavenly chorus that lifts us out of our cycles of despair and into the hope of Christmas.

Home for the Holidays

It's a season that makes us think about home.  "I'll be Home for Christmas,"  "Home Alone," decorating our homes for company or family...all these things take extra significance during the holiday season.  I don't know if it's Christmas, or if it is the fact that so many holidays converge in a 40 day period, or if we are just crazy, but we get home-phobic in all kinds of ways.  So I started thinking about homes we have lived in--and unlike many people, we have lived in a lot!

Our first apartment was a second-floor, west-facing, 1940's  house in Altus, OK.  The whole west side of the house was windows.  We lived there in the summer of 1980...average temperature outside 115, average temp inside, 100.  We put foil over the windows, shiny side out, to try and reflect some of the sun.  An air-conditioner, three fans and a water mister ran all night in our bedroom.  The kitchen was in the hall.  Open the oven or the frig and no one passed through.  The bathroom was broken for the first week of our lease and we had to go to Carl's parent's house to shower. 


Our first apartment at the seminary my husband decided to attend at the very last minute was the one no one else wanted.  It had been built probably in the the 20's. One bedroom, lineoleum floors that would not come clean, holes in the wall in the kitchen from the previous tenant's dart board.  (I considered maintaining the dart tradition with a picture of my husband, but decided that was petulant and I wanted to be the martyred party in the relationship.)  The bathroom was so grim I don't even remember it.  Ancient screw-open windows lined the entire front of the apartment, but they neither cooled the apartment in the summer or kept in the winter heat.  We were thrilled at the end of that first year when the school built new apartments and we were allowed to live in one...except, the new carpet had some kind of toxic allergen and we were sick for weeks.  I have never sneezed so much in my life.  The dog we got to protect us from the homeless guys that slept on our back porch ate the corners off the kitchen cabinets and the doorbell rang every Saturday morning at 7 am so the Jehovah's Witness could attempt to save the lost Presbyterian souls. 

 We lived in a couple of church manses (church owned homes for those of you not familiar with weird church words).  I will not pontificate about those, wishing to protect the innocent.  We bought our first house in Houston.  We took down fabric from the walls and scrubbed the paneling with Brillo pads to remove the nicotine.  When we moved in, you could see the outline of the gun collection on the wall in the family room.  We nested there with chimney birds.  Yep, the only house we ever owned with a fireplace was in Houston, TX.  Nice place to raise birds, not so nice for a fire.  Somehow it just didn't seem right to run the air-conditioner so we could watch flames flicker.

When we moved to Nebraska, we discovered wonderful things about our house -- things that were so good, the previous owners didn’t tell us.  For example,  we had a potential ice skating rink in the living room.  A thin layer of water on that  floor (which we discovered was uninsulated)  and we could have hosted Olympic skating--or made a bit of spare change for college tuition.  We knew the basement was plumbed for a bathroom, but we did not know there was already a shower -- coming conveniently from the plumbing in the main floor bath.  We never had to rake the yard.  When you opened the front door and the basement door at the same time, the house sucked in all the leaves.  Voila!  It was also the perfect house for raising teens.  The ancient coal-heating vents made every word in every room float through the house into our bedroom.  We could hear everything they said and whatever they did with their friends.  They never caught on.

            
The idiosyncrasies of houses make them "homes."  Only glossy magazine “houses”  are perfect.  Homes are places where you repair the screen on the back door torn off two years before when the dog was a puppy.  Then, when you open the door to bring the adult dog in, he jumps through  the new screen because--he always has.  Homes are where you have so many bikes you cannot park your car in the garage.  Homes are where the dog barks viciously at your ninety year old neighbor bringing cookies, but sleeps through the “intruder”  at two am who brings a phone message.  Home is spilled orange juice on the floor you just mopped.  Home is Barbies  with wet, cold hair from baths the night before in your six am shower.  Home is all your husband’s shoes lined up just “outside” the closet door.  Home is throwing all the junk into the basement to "clean" the house for company, then having to go to the basement with them  for a tornado warning.

I was listening to the radio segment talking about the stress of the holidays because everyone expects perfection.  I gave up on that years ago.  If you want perfection, buy a magazine.  If you live in the real world like we do, come on over.  The Utley’s are home.

The Wise Men...

The wise men came from the East -- having shopped in Greensboro and Winston-Salem all day.  And upon being exhausted with Christmas shopping for the babe in the manger, and while listening to the National Public Radio as they prepared the evening meal, behold they were amazed by the proclamation that one could shop the internet with only a few clicks of a mouse. 

            “Verily, I say unto you,” the announcer cried.  “No longer will you toil and curse the mall in which you shop.  No longer will your feet cry out for mercy.  No longer will impulse buying cause the balance in your checkbook to offend you.   Click in the age and gender of the person for whom an offering is desired.  The website will bless you with a multitude of options wanted by all people that age and gender.  And you will be forever comforted in your time of tribulation.”

            The wise men were no fools.  Immediately they caused the microwave to cease and the table was not laid.  Hearkening to the announcer’s voice, they went forth to the computer and made haste on the internet highway.  They gathered their bounty and rejoiced.

            No more would it be necessary to spend time with people to learn what they enjoyed.  No more would conversation flow disrupt time spent with the holy television or the sacred video game.  No more would hearts agonize about the perfect offering -- the wisdom of the computer would provide.  And if, perchance, a gift was unacceptable, return shipping was free and the blame could be placed on the retail systems analyst.

            The holy text was modified to read, “It is more blessed to give than to receive....if the giving requires little or nothing from the giver.”  And night fell on the wise men.

Stories...

Holidays are for story-telling.  Stories establish identity in a community and, frankly, are just plain fun.  Christmas was a unique experience in my childhood home.  Saying that Christmas was my father's favorite holiday was an understatement at best.  The year he received the city prize was nothing short of spectacular...and it's a great story.

An outline of lights transformed our house into a Christmas wonderland.  Santa and his reindeer were on the roof.  Every yard evergreen boasted its own lights--I remember three.  Candles constructed from toilet paper rolls, sand, wood, and light bulbs flickered in the windows. (They looked better than they sound on paper.)  A live Christmas tree beckoned from the living-room window, and symmetrically from the study, and aluminum tree basted itself in the glow of a multi-hued light wheel.

A life-sized manger scene, complete with camels and donkeys, began the fiew on the front lawn.  Rolls of spun glass twinkling with colored lights covered a ten-foot, black, plastic cone (alias one-by-twos and chicken wire).  The nighttime effect was a space-age tree, suspended in mid-air.  Five-foot candy  cane candles and a handmade holly wreath welcomed visitors to the front door.  Santa and his reindeer made an encore appearance in the yard as well.  (Sort of the brother Darrell and the other brother Darrell syndrome.)  This more honored display had once been stolen, but my dad chased the thieves on foot until they dropped the display in either exhaustion or boredom.  And the ultimate dream for this professor of Chemistry was on the far left--a fifteen-foot hardwood tree, cut, stripped of its leaves, painted white and covered with hundreds of hanging test tubes, each filled with its own brightly colored chemical.

The prize was ours, probably more for persistence than for good taste.  My dad reached a pinnacle of achievement--and a turning point.  A car, distracted by the decorations, hit our car and knocked it through the neighbor's fence.  In the night, right after the judging, a wind storm hit.  The chemical tree collapsed, shattering text tubes all over the driveway and killing all the grass on that side of the yard.  (Fortunately, the EPA did not yet exist.  We probably created some three-headed frogs as well.)  The final and ultimate blow was a light bill twice the size of the cash prize.  My dad said we couldn't afford to wind the prize again.

Before the disasters and the winning of the prize, Christmas decorations were magic.  That year, I think I moved into an adult Christmas mode.  I never reclaimed that "childhood magic."  But in its void grew a sense of spiritual wonder.  Adult Christmases bestow the love of family and friends, traditions owr worship and music, and a new, breath-taking realization of the gift of God's love.

May your holidays be full of stories, old and new...