and so this is...

Another Christmas past. This year's was better than most. Even with a couple of solid kicks in the peepee place. For all my hand-wringing fume and fret I can absorb some pretty fair blows and still stand. That would be a dandy thing to know without having to absorb them.
But I can't complain. I am saturated with gratitude. It has its roots in some odd things, but they make perfect sense to me. Christ wasn't born anywhere near this time of year. The Roman church co-opted a pagan festival, apparently. I don't know the story and I don't care. Something for others to argue about, 'cause there's nothing at all more important than debating someone else into the ground, right? I know His voice, and in spite of all the cosmoline layered on my soul I can feel His presence if it's strong enough. It is just that, this time of year, at least for me, the essential spiritual retard.
This is real to me. And that only matters to the extent that it points the way for it to be real to someone else. It was real before I happened, and it will be real long after I'm gone. It would be real if I had never happened at all. The gift He gave us demands attention. It demands a response. And yet it doesn't, because it is free. There is no gun at my head, just a surety that it would abase me to subhumanity to ignore such a gift, or worse yet to dismiss or desecrate it.
My will and ability to respond are contemptibly inadequate. I can't even touch what other humans have done for me, let alone God. What I do for them is so ludicrously disproportionate to the love and gifts and sacrifice they lavish on me that I never make it through Christmas encounters with friends and family without feeling a little slimy.
Christmas, in defiance of all the waste and nonsense our culture has heaped on it, still sees God invading our world right on schedule the same time every year. It's supposed to change us. I want it to change me, forever. I think it does. I listen to songs that I know will bring me to tears, even if I'm cleaning a rifle when I'm listening to them. I detail strip every hour of the holiday weekend and stamp the imprint of every song and gift and conversation into my soul like arsenal marks. I want those things to define me. I want to always be the tolerable creature I turn into this time of year. Even more, I want to know that I am stamping those same lovely marks into other lives, especially those who have poured so much into mine.
This is a very overdone and roundabout way of saying thanks. I have a lot to be thankful for, and I owe a great deal of thanks to a great many people. If you read this, and you think you're one of them, I won't argue. It would cost me nothing if I was wrong to think you were. I do not expect to ever scratch the surface of approaching, let alone matching what you do for me, but that's not the point. St. Paul admonishes us to owe no one but to love them, and I do not ever want to default on that. I know that I will, and that hurts, but to my eternal amazement it doesn't stop God or anyone else.
So thank you.