> $850,000,000,000.00

 https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/retailers-shrug-off-stock-turmoil-and-ring-up-strong-holiday-sales-14820420

This holiday season a six year sales record was hit -- USA spent more than $850 Billion dollars...let that sink in. Merry Christmas?


I've felt a numb boredom to the point of skipping Christmas Eve services. I have pondered; was it no snow, no watching those kids I purchased for open the gifts, my missing my always under-foot feline companion--on and on...I feel for me I have become so accustomed to our commercialization of Christmas that I need to re-engage myself with the core, true (self) core of this holiday to enjoy in a more natural way. 


 Perhaps, hearing that church pews hit record numbers of worshipers or there's a significant rise in random door-to-door carolers amid the worldly chaos or that the homeless population is on a decline. I dunno but hearing about Wall Street and Mastercard usage numbers just gives joy to me--the kind of Joy that says, yes!, this is why I felt a numb (disengage) boredom!  I am overcome with traditional Christmas boredom, the kind that tells me all this is not what Christmas is about...

The First Noel (click to listen)

Medusa [An Annie Lennox Advent]

 Whiter Shade of Pale - Annie Lennox

 

 

If you’ve been following the bouncing-ball, ‘grateful for’ this year is a blank I am struggling to fill in.  Advent my favorite, joy-filled time of year feels intensely somber, like Medusa is lurking around the corner; gaze and be turned to stone?  Keep averting the profane normalcy of today’s society? 

Christmas hymns, seasonal festive music, movies and yes, even “A Charlie Brown Christmas” all a numb boredom…however, the album Medusa by Annie Lennox feels seasonally appropriate.

I waited for the ashes of my 17+ year feline companion “to come” home to do my decorating, yes, even my little Charlie Brown Christmas tree.  It is not his physical absence, it is not that my physical Christmas gifts have been given, it is not that I look around seeing the physical reality of our world or even the physical reality staring back in the mirror.  Perhaps, the hidden scars & crosses I bear. 

Or perhaps, it is the real of the Christmas story; the portion lacking: infancy—adulthood of Jesus Christ–hidden.  Hidden below the surface. 

 *not my image or property*

Curious wondering with tones of I can’t even imagine.  What was Mary and Joseph’s life like those years?  Not to mention our dear little Savior–the “terrible twos” to the awkward-phase teenage years?  His realization of I am He!  Not to mention Mom and “Stepdad” (yeah, think about that!) parenting the worlds SAVIOR…

I can’t even imagine, yet I try, over and over again.  The imagery at times in my mind feels cute, fun clips and others feel worrisome…

Maybe this is the seed of my 2018 Advent somber tones.  Unknown.  Secret.  Hidden.  Uncertain.  Tied together with Faith.  Faith & Hope in the same unknown.  That in between, much like my own life’s places of in between–hidden.  The same but different, lacking.

 

12/2018 Tiger Albee Photo