God Bless .....
my pastor and our fabulous Bishop (the Most Rev. Jerome Listecki) for encouraging our pre-election leaflet distribution. We distributed almost all of 1000 sets of info. A few people wrinkled their noses, but should they act surprised to get this info at a Catholic Church? Eddie, with his angelic face, had 100% rate with his stack of papers. (Boy, that’s another great thing about having a large family. They can be conscripted when needed.) And so many other people were so great about responding to my last minute call for help. Now if I can just shake off my shame for being too pusillanimous to be the person who approached the pastor with this idea.

Thinking about Christmas?
Alexandra Baldwin writes on Catholic Light about ways of keeping Christmas is the real Christmas season. Excellent ideas.

I liked seeing someone mention putting up the Christmas tree on Christmas eve. That was always the tradition in my family when I was growing up. My father thought he was terribly liberal for allowing us to help decorate it - in his childhood Santa brought the tree in the middle of the night, to be revealed on Christmas morning when the doors of the living room were opened. (That is a trick of such a high degree of difficulty that I wouldn’t even consider attempting it!) In retrospect, I can see that the tree on December 24th tradition may have been hard on my Mom, as she was also trying to pull together Christmas Eve dinner and was usually somehow involved with the Christmas Eve program at church. Putting away the ornament boxes and vacuuming up the loose needles was probably a really nice extra strain on her, but I do so appreciate those memories. The smell of pine in the house and the tree decoration helped signal the beginning of Christmas. These days my hand is occassionally forced into putting the tree up a few days before Christmas, but not nearly as early as most people. And don’t get me started on the pang of sadness I feel when I see trees on the curb on the morning of the 26th. I spend a lot of time driving around ranting at the children that Christmas has just begun and all these other people are sooo confused. Or if I’m feeling jolly I try to rationalize to them that the people who jettison the tree early are probably on their way out of town for the rest of January and must regrettably take down the decorations prematurely.

I would recommend buying a tree before December 24th. A favorite story of my father’s was about his first Christmas as a married man. He had never given the tree thing a whole lot of thought (remember, Santa brought his trees) and so he spent a long time driving around on the afternoon of December 24th, 1949 trying to find a tree. This story always struck me as incredibly sweet and romantic. Until the year when all sorts of things had gone awry for us during December (pater recovering from surgery, sick kids, etc.) and the tree purchase slipped away from us until December 24th. It was not incredibly sweet and romantic. No tree lots wanted to give a deal on any trees. Yes, I thought tree dealers might actually want to move merchandise at the last minute. Actually, they saw people who they had over a barrel. The reasonably priced balsams were long gone and a $75 Frasier Fir was outrageous. So after a lot of driving around, petty bickering and what have you, we settled on a $15 Scotch pine. I am not a Scotch pine person. The family Christmas tree is my personal artistic expression (remember the 100 pieces of hand tooled tin tinsel?) and I have a gazillion ornaments, each with a special meaning and provenance. (When you have six children, the number of hand-made and gift ornaments is phenomenal!) You can’t fit as many ornaments on a Scotch pine. It was a sacrifice (for me). But we made do. We were happy. And now, about 7 years later it does almost seem sweet and romantic.

Oh, and if you feel illness coming on, you might also wish to expedite the tree. There was that year when my dad came down with the flu on December 24th and was shaking so badly with fever and chills that he didn’t quite get the tree up straight. But I think it was a pretty solid job anyway, because if my memory serves me correctly, that was also the year that I fell into the tree while dancing around to the Nutcracker. The tree did not topple.