It’s a wonderful time…

…it’s the greatest time of the year! Time for singing and dancing and time for joy and good cheer! Look at all of those presents just waiting there by the tree…

OK, so I grew up with the Chipmunks, what can I say?

It is, however, nearly “officially” Christmas time - for my family, the “season” always started the weekend after Thanksgiving. That’s when the songs started, the decorations started going up and it started to feel a lot like Christmas.

This will be a Christmas filled with firsts for me - last year was my “first” after leaving my marriage. This year will be the first (since becoming a parent) without the kids (they’re spending Christmas with their Dad). It will also be the first without Mom.

I have already taken down the Halloween decorations and the boxes of Christmas goodies have been hauled out.

I love the trappings of Christmas - I love the ribbons, the garland, the lights and the tree! It has to be a REAL tree too, one that smells beautiful and drops pine needles on the floor.

I even love dealing with Daisy, the Christmas Tree Ball Munching Boxer From Hell (I need to dig that post up and put it here sometime…) whose presence mandates that I refrain from decorating the lower three feet of tree with anything I value.

Though many may mourn the passing of the “true” meaning of Christmas, lamenting the lack of nativity scenes and being curmudgeonly about the commercialism - those are things I can happily block out. I may despise the marketing minions who, in their quest for the almighty buck, decided to put Santa up next to the Mummy way back during the Back-To-School sales, and I may miss the beauty of the public nativity (we still have one around here, thank you!) I’m simply enamored with the whole season.

It just seems that people are nicer. There are more opportunities to reach out beyond yourself, and more people do it with joy.

And there’s more than Christmas. That very same commercialism took a minor Jewish holiday like Chanukah and brought it to the eyes of many. Sure, there is a down side, but I challenge anyone to not find peace and beauty in the Festival of Lights! Skeptics may accuse Kwanzaa of being a “made up” holiday, but how can anyone be a Grinch about celebrating family?

So this coming weekend, despite the fact that I have so much else that needs doing, the decorations are starting! The laundry can wait while I hang the stockings and the vacuuming will simply be done after all the garland is draped and the lights are lit.

I even get to add to my decorations this year. Last year it was pretty basic - tree, garland, stockings, ornaments and lights. What shall I add this year? More garland? More lights? Lots of candles?

And with that, some thoughts on Christmas, not from me, but from others who have put it so well that I simply could never hope to do better:

Mary Ellen Chase
Christmas, children, is not a date. It is a state of mind.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.

Robert Lynd
Were I a philosopher, I should write a philosophy of toys, showing that nothing else in life need to be taken seriously, and that Christmas Day in the company of children is one of the few occasions on which men become entirely alive.

Joan Winmill Brown
Christmas! The very word brings joy to our hearts. No matter how we may dread the rush, the long Christmas lists for gifts and cards to be bought and given, when Christmas Day comes there is still the same warm feeling we had as children, the same warmth that enfolds our hearts and our homes.

Augusta E. Rundel
Christmas… that magic blanket that wraps itself about us, that something so intangible that it is like a fragrance. It may weave a spell of nostalgia. Christmas may be a day of feasting, or of prayer, but always it will be a day of remembrance — a day in which we think of everything we have ever loved.

And saving my two favorites for last:

Dale Evans Rogers
Christmas, my child, is love in action. Every time we love, every time we give, it’s Christmas.

Dr. Seuss
And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled ’till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store? What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more?

What are you doing?

I’m stealing this from a dear friend (the hostess of the show):

“Tomorrow Sept. 26 at 3 pm eastern?!?! You will be sitting in front of your computer litstening to me at: www.blogtalkradio.com/mommymatter

I will be sitting down and talking with Noam Freedman, proprietor of Firestore in New York City. Noam works with charities and first responders to spread word of the after affects of September 11. Firestore and more information can be found at http://www.nyfirestore.com/still-killing.html “

Seriously, y’all - as crazy as the show was with me (it was just a gab fest! Exactly what it was supposed to be!) this one should be a serious look at the issues surrounding post-9/11 for those who were there at Ground Zero.

My hat is still off to those men and women, and you’d better believe I’m gonna be listening in to this one!

Show some love people!

If you can’t catch it live, save the link and listen in on the archive later.

A question of compassion…

I am slowly working on a piece for a site on which I sporadically contribute and routinely read – Mothers Fighting For Others – it’s a piece that came to me because someone asked me to write on the topic. At first, I thought it would be easy, but there I was wrong.

You see, the piece is about child prostitution, specifically, about “tourists” who go to foreign countries seeking children for their sexual pleasure. My first glance at the topic had me disgusted and outraged. Further research had tears welling in my eyes, my throat constricting with the effort to hold back emotion.

I felt an intense compassion for these unknown children, forced into sexual slavery through circumstance and images of my own children, both right in the typical age bracket of these child prostitutes, came to mind. My heart ached to imagine children, like my own, selling their bodies, buying their dinner on their backs.

This, then, is one of many reasons why I write, why I put pen to paper, or in this case, fingers to keyboard (though that is not nearly as poetic) using my “voice” to speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves.

People cannot feel compassion for that which they do not know. They cannot feel compelled to help, to make a change, to do something, anything no matter how small, if the situation is beyond their eyes, beyond their world.

Only by bringing these tragedies to light, by sharing them, making them seem “real” and less like a distant news story, quickly covered over by the press of current events, can compassion come. And only through compassion will anything be done to bring about change in this world gone mad.

It’s not all about money, it’s not all about how much you can give, how much you can do. It’s about doing, giving, being something – and becoming a part of something larger than yourself. I sought, searched for the right words to express the concept of compassion, and amidst the overflow of sappy sentiments and the preachings of Chrisitianity, I found what, perhaps was the most accurate, the most succinct explanation of it:

“Compassion cannot be bought. It must be invoked, drawn down from the gods themselves, those masters of compassion, those creators of human beings in all their diverse forms.”

I found those beautiful words not in a sermon, or in some fund request from a charity, no. I found them from the pen of the Artistic Director of the Manitoba Theatre Centre. He was speaking of learning compassion through experiencing the arts, and his point stands firm when viewed outside of that context.

Compassion cannot be bought. It comes not from money spent, or deeds done – those instead are outgrowths of compassion, they are the result, not the reason.

Tags:
prostitution

sexual tourism

pedophiles

compassion