A look back

At this point in time, as I write, it is four days to Christmas Eve; five days to Christmas day. What can one write about? This is a good excuse to ignore the passing parade, the unchanging merry-go-round. As the year grinds to a halt, what can one do except to look back at the days of 2007, about 356 of them, almost all of them strewn like dead bodies along the highway of one's life. It's a personal thing, of course, and one asks of himself or herself – did these days represent attempts at excellence in the things we do. Or, with much regret, the days represent unthinking routine, mechanized actions, immediately forgotten after closure.

Whether at dawn or in the sunset of our lives we now are set wondering long thoughts, a few days before Christmas and also the New Year.

As far as I am concerned, no new year resolutions now. (I am tempted to write New Year dissolutions, but I won't go into that banal humor).

Time passes so quickly that we forget its passage. We are entertained, amused and horrified by the passing parade of this world that we do not look at the big time clock. The only people who don't think time passes quickly are those who are in jail. To them, the march of time grates like an un-oiled machine and they could feel the rattle and the tremor as their days pass. (Like Jalosjos?)

And of course time passes slowly for those who wait. Especially, for those who wait for justice to be done, time is an arthritic snail laboring to move an inch. Lately, the whole country waited with obvious agony for the Cheap Medicine Act to be passed by Congress. Many days came and went. Crowds come into drug stores, dig out the small change and wishing that the Cheap Medicine Act will decrease their medical bills. At last, luckily the Lower House passed the Act. The other day. But after a long wait.

* * *

A long time ago, I wrote a very short story about a time when the world, for its own reasons, abolished Christmas. It was a world with no Christmas carols, no bright colored cartons, tied with ribbons that contain gifts. No one got uttered Merry Christmas greetings. You can go to jail for that. Of course, pageants of the Baby Jesus in the manger were proscribed. So that no gentle Mary or Joseph watched over a manger in the town of Bethlehem . No shepherds, of course. They watched the flocks and wondered at a star that hovered above the manger. And the Three Kings? Of course, no three Kings who came from the East bringing their gifts to Baby Jesus.

It was as if that blessed event we called the birth of Jesus never happened. The world, as it had developed considered the event as a vestige of an unacceptable superstition. It had no place in a world powered by science and technology.

It was a barren world of course. Just pure common sense, they say. Look to the harsh reality of this world. Forget Christmas.

In that story, as the world turned many and many a time, and as memory fades the world forgot about Christmas. Still there were many people who felt that they must have forgotten and missed something marvelous in the deep past. They cannot really spell out what was it, but they strove to know. While the World succeeded in squelching Christmas, it has not entirely extirpated something in the soul and spirit of man, something that hankers for a star to hover over a manger and hear the cry of Baby Jesus.

Merry Christmas!*

back to top