Merry Christmas everyone.

Christmas time is my favorite time of year. I love the period from Friday after Thanksgiving through the day after New Years. I especially love the lead up to Christmas in the 10 days or so between the 10th and 21st. Christmas TV shows and Christmas movies. ( Yes Die Hard is a Christmas movie). I live to hustle and crowds at the stores and as this is my eighth and perhaps last Christmas living here in Germany, I love the walking around at the various Christmas Markets. The S. O and I went out Saturday to Stuttgart’s- in the rain – and we had a good time.

Christmas is time of hope because while indeed crassly commercialized, it nonetheless still has space for yearning for a better world and better people within that world. As the Honorable Mr. Kringle said some 24 years ago:

Oh, but there is. I’m not just a whimsical figure who wears a charming suit and affects a jolly demeanor. You know, I… I… I’m a symbol. I’m a symbol of the human ability to be able to suppress the selfish and hateful tendencies that rule the major part of our lives. If… you can’t believe, if you can’t accept anything on faith, then you’re doomed for a life dominated by doubt. 

And I want to believe it. Because without hope, what have we got? A life doomed by doubt and fear. And as someone who stayed up all night on Christmas Eve to watch this now 50 year old event, I have to cling to the hope, for a better world and future with better people.

Back in 2006, I wrote about my childhood fascination with that mission and with that night. Even now 50 years later, I still remember watching and listening to all the TV coverage, looking out the front windows of our house, watching the snow falling, and thinking how awesome it must be to be seeing the moon from that close. 1968 was, as 2018 is, a lousy, turbulent year, full of crises and despair in America. But as Time magazine pointed out at the time, somehow the voices of those three astronauts redeemed the year.

Sadly in 2018, there is no world transfiguring event like Apollo 8. This year, on Christmas Eve, we have the President of the United States doing his damnedest to ignite a financial crisis where the basis for none exists. We have a President who is caving in to other totalitarians, not out of some grand foreign policy vision, but because he envies them – and wants to cater to the misanthropes who constitute his sick and deranged “base”. Instead of turning the corner, we are laying the foundations for even worse happenings in the year to come.

The hateful tendencies, encapsulated in one poor, fundamentally evil man, are ruling the better part of American lives. 2019, I fear, will be a terrible year – both for me personally and for the country as a whole.

Jaime Escalante:
You only see the turn, you don’t see the road ahead.

And that’s the God’s honest truth. We have an inkling the road around the turn is tough, or even a dead end. But we don’t yet know for sure. And so, for at least a little while, we can dream and we can hope for better things to come.

And that is why Christmas is important to me. It reminds me of the need to respect the unknowable and things we have to take on faith. And it reminds me that we have to keep on hoping and facing the future in that hope. At the end of the day, its all we have besides our determination to make a better life for ourselves. I have a poster on desk that reminds of that every day:

Those Who Haven’t Faced Adversity Don’t Know Their Own Strength

So the wind is indeed blowing cold across the world and the land of my birth. But I will cling to the hope that we can, with help, resist this madness and bring a better day to ourselves and to our country.

Merry Christmas!