Santa Claus Ain't Comin'...Just Yet

Santa ain't comin' to our house tonight...he has been asked to postpone his mission so that my younger brother A can make it home. We didn't know until yesterday when, or if, A would make it home from his job in NV. And of course there can't be Christmas when A is out there working instead of home with us. Luckily, he is coming! But not till the 26th, so our 25th will be a very quiet day (I'll be re-re-writing a paper).

But tonight is December 24th, after all, so I've been wrapping presents and singing and listening to EWTN, which I find very soothing. In San Francisco, Grace Cathedral has its famous midnight mass. I went a few years ago and the sermon was about suspending disbelief. The Rev. said, "For all the skeptics out there, you think, oh, no way that it's true. Who would believe that? But just for one moment, just think, what if it happened? What if it is true? That would change everything, wouldn't it?"

I was wondering about that. I don't know that it would change much, except that I'd be in purgatory for quite some time trying to figure it all out (hopefully I wouldn't be lost forever).

Because although I don't believe that my Lord and Savior was born as an infant to a virgin who was born free of sin and conceived by the Holy Spirit and delivered without pain, I do think that the Nativity story is a very old and very true lesson about what human beings value and why they value it. Hope, love, new beginnings, sacrifice, being able to cope with what life brings... these things are valued in cultures the world over. Combine that with a warm and steady light, spiritual and physical, burning in the dark months when days are short and nights long, and you have what may be a universal need to celebrate that courageous human spirit that keeps us going during the hardest times of our lives. We have a need to survive.

Speaking of survival (or lack thereof), one present I'm giving this year (not telling who, they haven't opened it yet) is the latest version of the Darwin Awards. For readers unfamiliar with it, the book tells the sometimes tragic and always humorous tales of people who died in ways that were lamentably dumb before they reproduced, thus removing themselves from the gene pool. It serves as a cautionary tale to those of us who do not want to be up for consideration ourselves.

But this is not the point. The point is that St. Nick is probably glad that he has one less house to visit tonight (he's making the rounds as I type). In this day and age, even Santa does not go undetected. The kind elves at NORAD are tracking his flight: http://www.noradsanta.org/en/index.html. He's currently in Hawaii. You can play videos where the NORAD journalists speak briefly about Santa's journey.

I bet my parents wouldn't have been arguing earlier if they had known they could be watching Santa and his reindeer instead. Poor parents. Poor Santa.

But it's Christmas Eve! And in spite of everything, or maybe because of it, it's a terribly beautiful, wonderful world.