Christmas Carol

On this Christmas Eve, as snow falls outside here in Dallas, I'm listening to Mary Chapin Carpenter's great holiday CD "Come Darkness, Come Light."

And her song, "Christmas Carol" struck me. We're counting this as a rare White Christmas, whether or not it sticks on the ground, or there's any here tomorrow. And out at the stores a moment ago, how great it was to see the expressions on people's faces as they came outside, looked up to feel Christmas Eve snow falling on their faces.

Christmas Carol
by Mary Chapin Carpenter

The week before Thanksgiving Day
This town puts up its old display
Streetlights hung with candy canes and bows
The earlier it gets each year
The scarcer is my Christmas cheer
I guess I just like taking these things slow

I really don't remember much
Of Christmases growing up
Except the year the Beatles came to play
On my record player that came from Sears
That White Album filled my ears
In 1968 on Christmas Day

I haven't been to church since God knows when
I'm not someone who usually attends
Truth be told there's just two wishes
On my list every Christmas
Peace on earth and a snow storm now and then

Now I pray that peace comes in our time
It's hard enough to keep from crying
When every bit of news just breaks your heart
The same old stories, same old songs
We dust them off when Christmas comes
And for one day we just try to do our part

And around here winter seems to come
With rain and mud and bits of sun
It's not exactly Currier and Ives
I don't mind cold if it brings snow
Alberta Clippers come and go
But a dusting would make everything all right

Perhaps a Christmas eve from long ago
Delivered Christmas day with knee-high snow
It's something lost but not forgotten
Like candy hidden in a stocking
That makes me every year wish it were so

Because Christmas is for children's joy
For every single girl and boy
That's the truth we come to understand
But the memories that don't let go
Like Beatles songs and falling snow
Can make us feel innocent again

And maybe next year we won't go insane
When they rush to hang the bows and candy canes
Because peace will shine in me and you
From Bethlehem to Timbuktu
Even if the forecast is for rain

Because peace will shine in me and you
From Bethlehem to Timbuktu
Even if the forecast is for rain.

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The Abominable Holy Night: Because You Need a Laugh

OK. Get ready. If you've never heard this before, I offer you your biggest laugh of the day...because, as I often say, we people of faith take ourselves waaay too seriously....

The Abominable Holy Night

So now, you're wondering, "what was that?!!!" You can find out here.

All honor and glory to the Burnside Writer's Cooperative.

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Attention TCU: Welcome to the Big Show. Now Act Like You Deserve It.

I'm only writing this because I've heard multiple TCU friends complaining/grumbling over the past 24-hours about the BCS selection process.

They're saying...
"We got robbed."
"We should be in the big game."
"The BCS is afraid of us."
"The system sucks."

OK. For the record? I totally agree with the last statement. Yes, absolutely, the system sucks. Yes, absolutely, we need a playoff system. Right with you on that, baby. Power to the people.

In fact, if you're really interesting in a playoff system, check out this idea. I came up with this last year, when my team, the Texas Longhorns, seem to be one of the teams that got "screwed" by the system. Please remember that last year, the Horns *beat* Oklahoma. Yet Oklahoma went to the national championship game. In fact, we beat Missouri too, and the Sooners and MIzzou played for the Big 12 Championship.

Was that fair? Of course not.

So, it made me again consider the grail-like quest for a playoff system. But that's not gonna happen this year. In fact, it's not gonna happen next year either. In fact, the earliest it seems to me like it will happen could be 2015, but personally, I don't even think it will happen then.

So, that leaves us with the system we have now. The BCS. And you can love it, or you can hate it, but it is what it is.

So, to my TCU friends, let me say the following as lovingly and with as much care as I can:

Get over yourselves. Grow up. Welcome to the BIG SHOW. You've made it. Now act like you deserve to be here. Barring a *loss* by Texas, there was no way you were going to the National Championship Game this year. No way. (Sorry anybody told you differently...)

You're mad to be playing Boise again? Get over that too. I can give you a list of 100 other teams that would *kill* to play Boise in the Fiesta.

Please see that this is a totally different game. Nobody's "afraid" of TCU. Promise. You were not the only team in the top ten that needed to be placed in a big bowl. Given the way all the other chips fell, you ended up with Boise again. It wasn't because anybody is *afraid* of you. It's just how the whole system works.

You're playing in one of the five biggest games of the bowl season. Millions of people will put aside everything they are doing that day and enjoy watching your team. I hope you *crush* Boise. Seriously. That should put you in the top five, pre-season next year. (Possibly even #2) This is a good thing.

Almost NO team *ever* goes from never having played in a BCS game to playing in the championship game. Very few ever have. If you hope to be in the big time, play with the big boys, you've got to be play with them year after year after year. And you've got to get used to the fact that, now and then, your team will get "screwed." Some other year, your team won't get screwed. That's the way it works.

When I was in college UT lost a national championship because some guy dropped a punt. Was that fair? In the past few years, LSU has definitely been "screwed" by the system. Bama feels like they got "screwed" last year.

But, LSU has also won the whole thing in the recent past, and Bama now has a chance this year. That's the way it works.

Did you really think this year was your only shot? I hope not. I hope you'll be competing at the top for some time. College football needs the Boise's, the Cincy's, and you. Your emergence may be the thing that finally breaks up the BCS for good.

But it's not gonna happen without yall knocking at the door year after year after year...just like Texas does...just like Oklahoma, Florida, LSU, Oregon, and USC do. (BTW, since my Dad went there, Cincy is actually my personal favorite "Cinderella" this year. I think they are at least as deserving as TCU, but they're not getting a shot this year either...and their coach is definitely positioning the Orange Bowl as a step on the road to the Big Game....)

A win in the Fiesta Bowl will be a great next step for TCU, and it matters not that you're playing the same team you played before. Hate to tell you, but nobody watched that other game. (Yes, I know *you* did...) This year, we'll all be watching.

Finally, how pitiful that you say you'll cheer for Bama over UT. Again, this shows a lack of class and make me argue that you really don't yet belong at this level yet.

When OU goes to the championship game, I cheer for OU!! No kidding. If A&M went to the big game (hey, pigs could fly...) I would absolutely cheer for them. The same for Texas Tech or Oklahoma State. (Yes, I am now officially on record...)

Especially if the opponent is from the SEC, Big 10, or Pac 10, it makes sense to cheer for the team from your region. If TCU had gone to the National Championship game, I would *totally* be cheering for TCU over Alabama.

It's good for every team in this region if a team in this region wins.

But you're so "hurt" by the BCS this year that you can't see that. Which is really sad to me.

But I'm also trusting that, over the next few years, you'll grow into your role as a big-time program. To get mentioned by the media, to finally get to the big game, takes years and years.

Get over yourselves. Buy your tickets to Arizona. Cheer like hell.

And welcome to the Big Time.

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Kathleen, did you send the snow today?

What a joy to wake up to a brief snow storm this morning. (pics here)

What a joy to have Maria run in the bedroom, screaming "IT'S SNOWING!!!" That kind of memory will never fade.

Every time it snows, I will remember that moment of joy.

And I needed this snow this morning. I needed the joy. Because I have a sore throat and allergies that won't leave, yes, that's part of it. But the greater part is that one year ago this morning, Kathleen Baskin-Ball died.

A year ago, just a couple of hours from now, I got a call from Bill Ball, saying that Kathleen had just died. The rest of the afternoon was a blur of tears, prayers and hugs.

Like the blend of wet snow and rain that will surely come just a few moments from now, joy is mixed with sorrow, life with death.

The other day, Tom Geddie reminded me of a saying that was carved into the corner of the bar at the old Poor David's Pub on Greenville Avenue*. It was a little life observation that somehow fits today:

"Life is like licking honey off a thorn."

The good is always a "wintery mix" with the bad, sorrow will always follow happiness...will always follow sorrow...will....you get the idea...

So, I invite you to read this tribute I wrote about Kathleen a year ago tomorrow. It's my offering for the day.

And I will watch the rest of this snow melt off, grinning from time to time...and wondering....

Dear Kathleen, did you send us the snow today?

We love you and miss you still...

* Where Bill and Kathleen "remet" by the way...

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Buechner on Christmas

What follows is one of the most beautiful few paragraphs about Christmas ever written. I have had this blog...what?....six years? Why am I just now sharing this?

Anyway, here it is, from one of my all-time favorite writers, Frederick Buechner, and his book "Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized." (A book I cannot recommend highly enough)

"Christmas:
The lovely old carols played and replayed till their effect is like a dentist's drill or a jack hammer, the bathetic banalities of the pulpit and the chilling commercialism of almost everything else, people spending money they can't afford on presents you neither need nor want, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," the plastic tree, the cornball creche, the Hallmark Virgin. Yet for all our efforts, we've never quite managed to ruin it. That in itself is part of the miracle, a part you can see. Most of the miracle you can't see, or don't.

The young clergyman and his wife do all the things you do on Christmas Eve. They string the lights and hang the ornaments. They supervise the hanging of the stockings. They tuck in the children. They lug the presents down out of hiding and pile them under the tree. Just as they're about to fall exhausted into bed, the husband remembers his neighbor's sheep. The man asked him to feed them for him while he was away, and in the press of other matters that night he forgot all about them. So down the hill he goes through knee-deep snow. He gets two bales of hay from the barn and carries them out to the shed. There's a forty-watt bulb hanging by its cord from the low roof, and he lights it. The sheep huddle in a corner watching as he snaps the baling twine, shakes the squares of hay apart and starts scattering it. Then they come bumbling and shoving to get at it with their foolish, mild faces, the puffs of their breath showing in the air. He is reaching to turn off the bulb and leave when suddenly he realizes where he is. The winter darkness. The glimmer of light. The smell of the hay and the sound of the animals eating. Where he is, of course, is the manger.

He only just saw it. He whose business it is above everything else to have an eye for such things is all but blind in that eye. He who on his best days believes that everything that is most precious anywhere comes from that manger might easily have gone home to bed never knowing that he had himself just been in the manger. The world is the manger. It is only by grace that he happens to see this other part of the miracle.

Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have survived our own blindness and depredations otherwise. It could never have happened otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and strangeness of the grace that has led us to try to tame it. We have tried to make it habitable. We have roofed it in and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at best a touching and beautiful occasion, at worst a trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event in itself is indeed - as a matter of cold, hard fact - all it's cracked up to be, then even at best our efforts are misleading.

The Word become flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed. Incarnation. It is not tame. It is not touching. It is not beautiful. It is uninhabitable terror. It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space, time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this: "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God... who for us and for our salvation," as the Nicene Creed puts it, "came down from heaven."

Came down. Only then do we dare uncover our eyes and see what we can see. It is the Resurrection and the Life she holds in her arms. It is the bitterness of death he takes at her breast."

-- Frederick Buechner

(As always, if you like this post, then "share it" or "like" it on Facebook by clicking the box below, so others can see too...)

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A Piece of the "Advent Conspiracy"

I've been fans of the folks at "The Advent Conspiracy" for a couple of years now. Every December, I like to see the kinds of things they're putting out, to encourage folks to buy less and yet give more at Christmas.

If you are confused by how one might buy less yet give more, check out this brief video:



What's great about this kind of "conspiracy" is that it grows best when it grows organically, from the bottom up.

Take what my friend, and fellow Northavener, Vicki Caroline Cheatwood is doing. An old high school friend of hers, Scott Horton, is a military guy stationed in Afghanistan this holiday season and recently contacted her with the following message:

"Many of you have asked what I might want for Christmas in a care package. Thank you for the offer as I am most grateful but, here is an idea. In the season which we focus on GIVING, would you send to me some practical clothing articles, even SOCKS and SHOES which your children have outgrown? I see many victories in this opportunity. I have driven around Afghanistan as winter has begun to set in; children dig through the trash to find things to wrap like newspaper, around their bodies. So thanks for offering goodies, but here's a chance to give and I will deliver the clothes here like Santa Claus. If this interests you, please send me a note and I will provide you my APO address. God bless you - Have a great Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas - Scott"

So, Vicki's been putting out the word, via her Facebook, email,and church friends. She's hosting a "packing party" at her house this Friday night. She'd love for you to donate any gently used clothing that you might have to offer. If you want to be involved, leave a comment below and I will send you info on how to find her house so you can drop stuff by.

Afghanistan is certainly in the news these days, and many people are trying to figure out how they might help. Maybe this is the way *you* will be involved in the "Advent Conspiracy" this year.

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