Christmas '67

The one thing about the holiday season is the fact that it's the only time of the year where the past and the future meet and sometimes clash.  We base this holiday season on the memories of past ones and hope this one will be the best which it seldom is.  We all have that one magical Christmas to base our hopes and dreams on.  Mine was Christmas of '67 when there was snow, lots of it.  I went to my first Mass and being Methodist I wondered why my congregation couldn't have the beauty of the Mass, especially at midnight.  Then there was that girl who was that once in a lifetime.  And the visit with her friends on Christmas day, and the Christmas feast.  It was a simple Christmas because her parents were simple people, but people who were the finest, most honest I have ever known.  3 years later, I was without the girl, in a place I didn't want to be, thousands of miles from family, and growing more distant from friends.  That was the Christmas to be forgotten, and once you have one of those, the rest come with baggage.  You start seeing the distance between the meaning of the day and the cynicism and the commercialism.  In '67, we didn't have stores opening at 5 AM..or the new trend of staying open then rolling out "Black Friday" deals at 5AM that aren't really deals unless you're buying an really off brand HiDef TV.  You actually get better deals toward Christmas when stores unload excess inventory they bought for the holiday season.  But in '67, stores were open a little longer for the holidays but closed on Sunday.   We still considered it to be a day of rest.  But somehow we managed to shop for everybody.  The gifts were small by today's standard.  We still put more emphasis on the meaning of the season, not what diamonds or electronics would do to prove you were...To be honest, I don't know what that proves...I guess it just proves you can max out your credit card.  I always had a dilemna.  I always wanted things that had electricity going thru them and she knew nothing about electronics, and she wanted clothes and jewelry that looked expensive and weren't.  So for a few years I bought Jewelry that looked expensive and was, and she'd buy a stereo component from Sharper Image that looked cool but was crap.  So we started shopping together and she'd pick out her gift and I'd pick out mind, then wrap them up and put them under the tree til Christmas when we would unwrap them..sometime after Thanksgiving, but well before Christmas..So now, if we see something we like, we buy it then, Whether it's Memorial Day, Groundhog Day, etc.  .The long and short is, there are rarely gifts under our tree.  That didn't happen Christmas of '67.  There was snow then, the likes of which I'll never see again.  Love was more important that the gifts.  The Meaning was more important than the shopping.  Everybody has a Christmas of '67, just a different year.  My memories of that Christmas got me through a few others where I was far from home and had no Christmas Spirit whatsoever.  We've all had a few of those too.  Especially those of us who have spent time in uniform, in places where Christmas celebrations have to be low key due to religious sensitivities.  Hopefully those in harms way this year have a Christmas '67 of their own.