Posted by guest blogger, BroKen.
“I’ll be home for Christmas. You can count on me. I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams!”
A friend of mine describes it this way, “The homing instinct is strong at Christmastime.”
Several years ago, when I was single, the company I worked for decreed there would be no time off on Christmas Eve. So I stayed home at Christmas while the rest of my family gathered across the country at my sister’s place. As a joke, they stuffed a pair of pants and a shirt with newspapers, set them on a couch with a basket ball for a head and said it was me. The real me was alone that Christmas. Mine was a hollow celebration. Home is not a place, it's people and love.
My favorite homecoming Christmas story comes from my friend Homer. He tells of traveling across country with a couple of buddies and a three-day pass from the Navy, trying to get home for Christmas. Their car breaks down and they seem to be stranded, hopeless. A local mechanic is supposed to be at a party with his wife, but instead, he spends the evening taking the rear-end out of a junked car he has, and placing in it theirs. They don’t have money to pay but the mechanic just says, “Send it to me when you get where you’re going. Merry Christmas!” They made it home that Christmas and, of course, the first thing they did was to send the mechanic his money. What makes this story my favorite is that although it has been well over fifty years since this happened, when Homer tells it to you, there are tears in his eyes.
Of course, that the mechanic couldn’t run his business like that all the time. He’d be broke before the end of January. But that is the point. At Christmas we do things we wouldn’t, or couldn’t (and in this world probably shouldn’t) do all the time. And yet we know the things we do at Christmas are the things we would do and should do, if we could do them all the time.
If we could, we would stay with people we love and who love us. But in this world we can only be one place at a time. If we could, we would help others who are in need, with the hope, even expectation that others will help us when we are needy. But so many of us would take advantage of a system like that. I know I would! That’s our world.
Christmas says there is another world where love is unlimited so no one need take advantage of another. Every now and then, especially at Christmastime, that other world intersects with ours and brings tears to our eyes. Is it just a dream world; a fantasy for children? Maybe. Still, I call that other world, “home”. The homing instinct is strong at Christmas time.
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