Most wonderful time

Ah, Christmas. It’s the most wonderful time of the year, or so the lyrics to one of about a thousand popular Christmas songs tell us.
Folks’ hearts just overflow with love and good cheer. Folks who have completed their Christmas shopping, that is. The rest of us, gentle readers, are in an absolutely foul mood. The mere prospect of venturing out into the untrammeled hoards of shoppers at the various mercantile emporia is enough to curdle your blood.
To paraphrase that eminent philosopher Ebeneezer Scrooge, anybody who looks forward to elbowing his way through a crowd of blood-thirsty Christmas shoppers, just to get Uncle Bob a pair of glow-in-the-dark sweat socks, should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.
Okay, I’m not really against the Christmas season. Actually, I look forward to it, especially this year since I’ve got two grandkids to share it with.
And I’m certainly not going to waste my time complaining about the commercialization of Christmas. Far more eloquent spokesmen than I have talked themselves hoarse trying to make that point.
The thing is, I really think Christmas doesn’t (one might even venture to say shouldn’t) happen in department stores, shopping malls, jewelry shops or toy stores. The same goes for Christmas parades, community festivals and musical programs. And I’ll even risk ostracization by saying that Christmas can’t be found in traditional candle-lit church services or contemporary-feel-good-glorified-tent-revivals. These are only reminders, and pale, human reminders at that.
Christmas happened a couple of millennia ago, in a filthy barn where the creator of the universe, for reasons of his own, chose to give humankind the greatest gift we have ever received. Christmas has a chance, but just a chance, to happen again every second of every day in every human heart. If it doesn’t happen there, and spread outward with every breath we take into everything we say and do to and for the humblest of our fellows, all the reminders in the world mean exactly zilch.
Joyeux Noel, y’all.