Scribbles from a Scribe

I'm not sure why, but I've always loved a brightly lit Christmas tree.

Maybe it's because the creation symbolizes joy - the joy of the Christ child's birth, or the joy that comes when the presents under the tree are opened, or the joy of loved ones gathering for the holiday the tree helps symbolize.

Maybe it's the variety of colors that the lights typically offer, standing out particularly vividly in a darkened room.

Or maybe my special affection has its roots in my childhood, when I came to love seeing a lit-up Christmas tree in a darkened room after coming in from an active - often cold - day at school or outside. It was so peaceful, so calming, so...regal, almost.

I thought that even though our trees were never ostentatious or 'over the top', so to speak - at least compared to many trees I've seen since then. It's entirely possible to do "too much" to a tree, to where it's a garish avalanche of images assaulting the eyes.

The best Christmas trees to me, in fact, have an air of simplicity about them: a nice mix of lights, ornaments and icicles, plus those touches that personalize the tree for the family using it: memento photos or ornaments, heirloom tree-toppers, perhaps.

However you decorate your tree, make it a delight for the eyes - and the memories.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

One of the great "tragedies," if you will, of the Christmas season is that we get so caught up in the shopping and the decorating and the various holiday parties we feel obliged to attend that the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas become overloaded with stress and lengthy to-do lists - when the whole point of the season is to slow down...celebrate with family and friends a festive occasion...and be grateful for the gifts that truly matter: loved ones and treasured relationships.

In the Catholic Church, the Sunday after Thanksgiving marks the beginning of Advent, which means ---- waiting. Waiting in joyful hope for the coming of the Christ Child.

But how often during these hectic days of December do we quietly wait?

One of the best memories of my childhood was those December days when I'd come home from school/basketball practice or come in from a long day of doing chores to a darkened living room with the Christmas tree lit up. Often, I'd go in there and just sit for a while...in the darkness....in the stillness......and gaze upon the tree.

I still like to do that, here in Wichita or out at the family farm if I'm out there prior to Christmas. It's a reminder to slow down --- and remember what it is we're truly celebrating.

After more than three weeks of gracing my living room, my Christmas tree is coming down today. It's a tradition in our family - indeed, in many Catholic families - for the tree to stay up until the first Sunday of January, the Feast of the Epiphany, honoring the arrival of the Three Wise Men at the manger in Bethlehem.


For most of my childhood, we selected freshly cut trees for the holiday. Artificial trees just didn't look good. My brothers and sisters were anxious to have the tree up as soon after Thanksgiving as possible. But our parents made us wait....and wait......and wait - typically until mid-December.

Looking back, I understand why. We kept the tree up into early January, not the day after Christmas. If we put the tree up in late November, that meant it would stand for up to 6 weeks. Six weeks of falling needles, a drying tree and eventually a significant fire hazard.

Once we found an artificial tree that looked nice, the safety and maintenance concerns went away, and it's become a tradition for the kids and grandkids to set up the tree at the farm on Thanksgiving weekend.

But I wonder if, in its own way, the old timing wasn't the better idea after all. While we little ones were anxious to have the tree up as soon as possible, the wait reminded us of the real reason for the season: an infant born in Bethlehem.

Our "official'' family Christmas was smaller this year than in most years past, with only a couple of my siblings and their extended families joining Mom and I out at the farm this year.

But it still offered a bevy of delightful memories.

Jameson, my 3-year-old great-nephew, was convinced every present under the tree had his name on it.

"I hope he has help distributing the presents, or they'll all end up in the same place," I told my goddaughter Rachel as we waited for everyone to settle in for the opening of gifts on Saturday afternoon.

The presents duly distributed, I did what I do every Christmas: sat back and watched everyone else open their presents.

"Dinosaurs! I got dinosaurs!" Jameson shouted, holding up an Allosaurus and Stegosaurus, battery powered beasts that roar and have movable legs.

He was also thrilled with the dinosaur movies he got for Christmas, and I'm sure they're the first thing he watched once he got home. The homemade pajamas? Um, not so much. But they sure looked like they'll keep him nice and warm the rest of this winter, and a few winters still to come.

I could relate to his enthusiasm about dinosaurs, though. I was fascinated by them as a boy, too...and that interest didn't wane even into adulthood. When my girlfriend, Karla, and I went to Salt Lake City to visit her sister, I figured out a way to swing by the Dinosaur National Monument on the way back, pestering the curators with questions as closing time bore down on us.

Gillian, at 7 months old the newest member of our family, was most fascinated by the wrapping paper her presents came in. Oh, and that other baby she kept seeing...in the mirror she was given as a gift. Darned if that other baby didn't look just like her! She also is the spitting image of her mother, my niece Stacey, at the same age.

I don't remember Stacey chatting as much as Gillian does. Gillian just loves to talk, even if it's still baby babble and no intelligible words have formed yet. It makes me smile, because it's a sure sign she's content.

When I was little, we saved Christmas wrapping paper as if it were made of money - no surprise, really, when you consider my parents were stretching their dollars as tightly as they could so they could keep eight kids clothed and fed. Later on, as more of us left the nest, they didn't feel the need to be as cautious --- so the grand finale of our gift exchange was usually a blizzard of "snowballs" made from the remnants of the wrapping paper. This year's version was merely a few flurries.

We didn't take our usual walk along the farm paths and fields after the big holiday feast - perhaps because it was so cold and windy out and also because a couple of my siblings were eager to dive into a round of Nertz. That card game, sort of like solitaire on steroids, has been a family passion ever since I was little. We usually pair up in teams of two, though one person can handle both duties - the pile of 13 cards and the main pile from which the player turns over three cards at a time just as in solitaire. I think we played until supper time, losing track of the score along the way. Mom was right in the middle of it, which was probably the best part of all.

After supper, I set up Mom's new Netflix account, a modest gift from her children that will allow her the joy of seeing movies from decades past that she always wanted to but never did because she was too busy raising a bushel-basket full of kids and there never seemed to be money around to catch those films in the theater.

She'd be the first to say, however, that the presents which mean the most to her are the presence.....of her large and often boisterous family.

I can only second that emotion.

With rain and snow in the Saturday morning forecast, I decided to come out to central Kansas Friday night to avoid the possibility of hazardous driving conditions. Of course, that meant driving at night on an unseasonably warm - and awfully windy - night, which offers its own challenges....chief among them deer stirred by the warm weather and semi-trailer trucks wobbling in the howling winds.

I prayed a rosary as I started out, something I like to do for any trip of consequence. It calms me and helps clear my mind for the drive. The last red wisps of sunset were glazing the western horizon as I left Wichita, and before long I was reminded how dark it gets in the rural areas at night - especially, it seems, on winter nights.

There are no bright city lights to pierce the darkness, only pinholes offered by distant stars. My preferred route to the family farm steers me clear of Hutchinson so that I can save time. At night, Hutchinson glows like a dome in the distance, almost like a hovering spaceship of civilization in the cosmos.

I couldn't help but think of outer space as I drove. Wisps of fog clung to the ground in strands, and they'd rush past my car like swooping ghosts. With little but the nighttime sky in front of me I imagined being the captain of a federation starship penetrating the outer bands of a distant galaxy as I pushed west on Trail West Road in Reno County.

It was only a little after 7 p.m. when I reached Partridge, a speck on the map just south of U.S. 50, but already the town was bedding down for the night. Few lights flickered in the town, and I imagined its residents settling in on a quiet Friday night, still basking in the holiday spirit. I found myself reflecting on how every home in a small town seems more important to its neighbors than in a big city, if for no other reason than because there are so few of them.

I expected more traffic on U.S. 50 between Hutchinson and Stafford, but there wasn't much. Noting the signs reporting that Macksville and St. John were coming up, my thoughts turned to Tim Buckman, the law enforcement officer who was killed on this very road not too many miles west of where I was at the moment. He was driving to Macksville on the night of May 4, 2007, to warn them of an approaching tornado when he was blindsided by a second tornado and blown into a field on the north side of the highway.

Ever since then, I haven't been able to make the turn from U.S. 50 onto U.S. 281 without reflecting on how close tornadoes came to decimating the nearby towns of Belpre, Macksville and St. John on the same night an EF5 obliterated Greensburg. Those towns would have been hit late at night, when folks were bedding down for the night - a mood not unlike what I was sensing on my drive tonight.

My thoughts then turned to our family Christmas gathering on Saturday. Several - though not all, by any means - of us will be there...though it's still hard to believe Dad won't be part of it. This will be our third Christmas without him, but I'm still amazed at how fresh losing him feels at times. I grasp completely what those who have suffered similar losses told me for years: You never really get over it, you just figure out how to deal with it over time.

Holidays are natural milestone moments, when families and loved ones gather to celebrate. Inevitably, such times reveal how lives are changing: New additions through marriages and births, aching losses through such events as deaths, divorces or break-ups. It's easy - perhaps human nature - to focus more on the losses or what we don't have that we'd like to. But I know that's not what the child born in Bethlehem would want us to do.

The last few miles into Larned went quickly, perhaps because I found myself watching keenly for any deer that might dart in front of me. Thankfully, the hotel hadn't mangled my reservation, and now it's me who's settling in for the night.

Morning will be here soon enough.