In the search for patterns, it is easy to default to dividing life by the years. 2025 was a tough one, for example. Or, when I was younger, I was convinced the odds were better than the evens: seventeen was more delightful age than eighteen. But what can anyone, much less a teenager, predict from that?
This is the season when turning the calendar gets more attention than usual, definitely more than it merits, but a different pattern also emerged. Rather than impose divisions on my time, it provided a glimpse of the continuity of the whole.
When I decorate my room, I put up a little artificial (gasp!) tree. It is strung with multicolored (gasp!) lights that hearken to the big colored GE screw-in bulbs on the family tree when I was growing up. On it are decorations I pull from a box my mom started for me about fifty years ago when I began accumulating my own ornaments as gifts. Odd ones my grandmother gave me (an owl the color and texture of a pencil eraser embedded with small mirrors), silly ones my aunt gave me (peg figures of chefs because even then I liked to cook), collectible ones my mom gave me (ceramic Snoopy on a sled), and the one my fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Taylor gave me in 1974 (a hand-painted plaster of Paris snowman). Over the intervening years, I have received straw ornaments from Germany from my sister; ceramic bells and little birds from Mom; and several others from buddies that are most tactfully displayed in my private space. There are also innumerable train ornaments, including the locomotives Jupiter and No. 119 that met at the Golden Spike in Promontory Utah. It’s all capped with a corn-husk angel I picked up at Tumacacori Arizona on an excursion there from my sister’s place in Tucson with her and her husband and my mom and dad. It’s new – only fourteen years old.
Decorating the tree does not take long, but it carries me through more than fifty years of people and relationships and Christmas.
There’s another tree one floor directly below my little one, in the front office. This one is real (thanks CYO!) and also has multicolored lights. It has been up for weeks – since the day after Immaculate Conception – but is only half decorated even now. This is the Parishioner Tree, and the ornaments are still arriving daily in the mail. It is where we hang the family-picture Christmas cards we receive. Not only our current population smiles at us in their photo finery; past parishioners still update our remembered images of them with this year’s greetings. For example, a couple whom I prepared for marriage but left the area shortly afterward sent a picture with their five kids. Past and present, together it’s a festive throng we can pause to enjoy any time we pass through the office. New parishioners, it is not too late to bring your cards for the tree!
This tree takes the whole month-long Christmas season to decorate and assembles in one place evidence of twenty years as Pastor of Saint Bernadette.
The New Year celebrates the turning of a paper page and the click of a counter. This structure imposed upon our time is as necessary and even helpful as it is artificial. It divides and distinguishes days, months, and years. Christmas, however, and the recurring elements of its celebration, be they food or flowers or songs, reveal the context and continuity within our individual lives and with the lives that have touched ours. Central among them is the life of the child Jesus, the incarnate Word of God, who is not a memory but a presence and power Who unites who we are with who we were and who we will be, each of our days and months and years into the ongoing history of the salvation of the world.
One of my newspapers carries a columnist whose humor I appreciate and whose latest book is entitled, Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life. I concur with his prohibition because I know luck has nothing to do with it. Grace, on the other hand, defines every day and binds the parts into the glorious whole. What we mark at the New Year is the finitude and failures of time. What we touch at Christmas delights us, for we hold in our hands the very elements of eternity.
Monsignor Smith
