December is upon us.  Very soon, all will be involved in a schedule of holiday festivities.  The merriment begins the day after Thanksgiving.  On Sunday Batavia hosted our tree-lighting ceremony, with a band playing holiday tunes, our Mayor recognizing the high school coaching staff and achievement of the football team, then Santa arrived, transported on the big red fire truck.  It was all quite magnificent.  The experience was communal with a few hundred neighbors, particularly those with young children eager to speak with Santa about what they wished to receive on Christmas morning.

This event and certainly those which are to come will ignite reflection upon the Christmas story as written in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.  These are two stories, each with its own emphasis.  The difference is a clue that there is no single true telling of the tale, but versions, many angles of view according to the inclination of the teller.  A myth is recognized as true in so far as it shows what it means to live authentically, modulated, harmonized with family, with community and with the earth.  Or so it seems to me.

What do you think?

There is a new born baby. This new being without history, is a wonder of innocence, unstained by the inevitable compromises demanded by language, by friction and survival in company with other bent and bruised humans.  Innocence is adored is it not?  It is rare.

Mary and Joseph anticipate marriage, but she is pregnant.  A condition that is a stain in many times and places.  It’s is no one’s fault that Mary is a mother outside of social norms.  Still judgment is assigned to a woman.  A hint of darkness in a scene bathed in heavenly light, angels singing.

There’s no vacancy according to the desk attendant at the Holiday Inn.  But “we have a stable out back; there’s a manger with clean straw.”  For two weary adults that sounds good enough.  Such is a snapshot of the type of sacrifice which working class adults make every day.  Life is just surviving, to get up and do-it-all-over-again.  No insignificant detail, the manger.  The domesticated animals nearby are implied. Nature is never too far away.  Working class people are reminded continually of just how delicate, precarious life is.

The photos were taken over the past few days.  I enjoy the spectrum of possibility for building out the Christmas story, the stylized angels holding a dove, the symbol of peace.  The upside down Christmas tree, is striking with it’s implication that Christmas is the story of a newborn whose ideas were to disrupt an empire: Christ vs. Caesar.  Kindness vs. brutal force.  A revolution of kindness cannot be stamped out.  Santa Clause is a personification of kindness, over the arc of life, being kind to one another is key to thriving. 

There is one rule: be as kind as you can muster to one another.