Thursday, December 25, 2008
Finding Christmas joy during lean times
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Shanna Flowers is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.
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The packages are unwrapped, and fewer bows and colorful paper litter the floor today. You didn't get the gift you wanted, and maybe not the one you really needed.
And you're OK with that.
Christmas 2008 -- and perhaps most of 2009 -- will be remembered as the time that brought America back to its center.
Not to its political center, but back to the core values that matter most. Hardship and uncertainty have a way of distilling the meaningful from the insignificant.
This Christmas, as debt holds consumers in a stranglehold and holiday splurges of recent years now seem like regrettable folly, families are rediscovering the real joy of Christmas.
Christmas is family and friends. It is peace and good will. It is God's love wrapped in swaddling clothes, the eternal hope that girds in uncertain times such as these.
Christmas is the gift of all of those things.
This year, America has come back to that.
Many of us lived through the days of largesse. We stopped giving from the heart and started giving for the sake of giving.
("I don't know what to get auntie. She has everything and doesn't need anything, but I've got to get her something.")
Don't get me wrong. I don't decry gift-giving -- for the right reasons -- and I can never deny the children. But as we became more and more consumed by crass commercialism, we seemed to pay less attention to the real reason for the season.
Then the stock market tanked, major banks failed, and the layoffs began. That stuff has been the catalyst for the nation's change of heart.
I've spoken with people who say they are cutting back -- because of economics.
But the lean times also have made folks recall the days when they didn't have much under the tree. They were just as happy.
One time, I asked my father, who is now deceased, what he used to get for Christmas as a boy growing up in Depression-era Mississippi.
As a typical middle-class kid who never wanted for much, I remember being appalled when he said that his parents would give him and his three brothers and sister each a shoe box containing an orange, an apple and some nuts. In good years, they'd get a candy cane, too.
At other times, he would talk about how his family was poor, but he didn't know it because they were like everyone else.
By today's standards, they had nothing. But they had each other.
We may not have as much this year. But if we look closely, we have more than we realize.
Hold dear those friends and family. Laugh, cry and share fellowship with them.
And ask yourself: What's really important right now?
