We cooked a big ham for Christmas dinner.

It wasn’t huge…it didn’t need wheels to get it over to the oven.

But it was big. You don’t notice how much “more than you need” it is until everybody’s full…and the “pan of pig” is left and waiting to be put into the refrigerator so we can try and eat it later.

I took the bone, after I’d trimmed as much meat off it as I could, into a pot to boil down and make some bean soup today.

My parents used to do that with the ham bones that were left over.

They never sat me down for a “you must do this” talk…but it must be something I internalized, because every time we infrequently have a ham, I’m boiling the bone…getting ready for the soup to come.

I think I almost like the soup better than I like eating the ham.

It feels like I have to wade through the ham to get to the really good stuff…the soup I make out of the bone.

Nobody celebrates the “Christmas Hambone”, though.  I don’t see it advertised much.

I doubt that I could get away with trying to get everybody excited about the “Christmas Bone”.

I might come across as kind of a cheapskate.

“Gruel for Everybody!! Merry Christmas!!!”

“I love gruel!  Don’t you just love it?  Soooooo economical.”

I learned that I need six nails for stockings now.

I put up 5 out of habit…Jenny and I had to double up.

Sparrow seemed watchfully oblivious this year.

She didn’t really care that she didn’t get a lot of presents…mostly, she seemed more interested in the lights and the noisy unwrapping.

She’s not even quite a month old yet…so next year I suppose she’ll be up to speed with the “present action”.

What do you call that?  The “future present action”?  That’s kind of funny…the “future” present action.  Hah!

I just now figured out something about Christmas that I kind of like.

I like most things about Christmas.

The actual true meaning of Christmas is very cool…very cool.

Some of the “add-ons” can be kind of a pain in the rear…the commercialization and stresses that come with that…stuff like that aren’t so great.

But what I just realized is that Christmas has some momentum that carries over for a while after the actual day is over.

It’s hard to stop a moving train…and even though the stresses of getting the packages together…or planning the “big meal” have passed…some of the feelings carry on for a bit after the season has passed.

Christmas has “legs”.

That’s pretty cool, too.

It’s not something that we talk about.  Maybe talking about it is a “buzz killer”.  Maybe I shouldn’t talk about it…maybe it’s like staying still so you don’t scare away the hummingbird?

Shhhhhhhhh.

But you can’t stop “peace on earth, goodwill towards men” on a dime.

You just have to ride it all out.

That’s a good thing.  I like “residual kindness”.

So…put up six nails for the stockings, try to stay nice for a while (honor the momentum), return the few things that didn’t look like keepers…

and boil the bone.

There’s some life lessons to chew on for a while.

At our house, “the baby” gets held.

The baby gets held because that’s what you do.

The baby gets held because, like all our children, she’s a treasure…and we want to.

We want to hold her.

Sometimes, though, we have needs.  We have pressing concerns. We have duties that need to be addressed with some urgency.

We have a life, too.

When that happens, whoever is holding the baby goes to “the other”…whomever the closest “other” is at the moment…and says, “Could you hold her for a minute?  I really have to….(fill in the blank).”

And we make the “handoff” and someone else is holding the little hot potato for a while.

(I’m kidding about “hot potato”…that conjures up bad images of babies flying through the air, “HOT POTATO!!! HOT POTATO!!! HOT POTATO!!!”…”adults” laughing as they pass the infant quickly from one set of hands to another. We don’t do that…I don’t encourage that.)

We don’t play “hot potato” with Sparrow….parenting isn’t some kind of weird game.

I know that.

But I digress.

What I was really thinking about saying was that, while I was driving package after package after package after package yesterday (it was actually a lot more monotonous to do it than to read it …if you can imagine that), I wondered if Mary ever had any moments where she said, “Can you hold Him for a minute?”

“Can you hold Him for a minute.”

“Joseph!  Joseph!  Come quick!  I need to ….(fill in the blank).  Can you hold Jesus for a minute while…”

We don’t think of the situation like that.  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were a different sort of family, right? Divinity excuses you from being a real human being, right?

And if we can arrive at the conclusion that they were somehow outside of the normal human experience, then we don’t really have to consider them as anything more than a nice Nativity scene…or a really pretty picture.

That’s a little easier for us to pass off as just another “sideline interest” or “part of my life” than being constantly aware of the humanity of this new little baby and his young parents.

We might identify too closely for our own comfort if we tried to really “flesh out” the story of Christ’s birth.

I don’t know if Mary ever put the baby Jesus down.  Maybe she held him all the time? I never heard about that part.

Maybe the issue of “could you hold Him…?” never came up.

From what I understand, Joseph was a stand-up kind of guy.  He was there for her when she needed him.  I’m sure he would have helped her if she needed someone to hold Jesus for a minute.

The Bible doesn’t talk about that part of Jesus’ childhood.

Maybe it talks about it some in Luke?  I don’t remember…Luke seems to fill in some of the holes, but I don’t remember that being one of the revelations about Jesus’ life that the disciples talked about.

Tonight we celebrate the birth of a little, vulnerable, precious little human baby named Jesus.  All over the world, people celebrate this event.  We celebrate God made Man.  What could be a bigger deal than that? What could be a more profoundly moving miracle than that? It’s amazing.

And we also celebrate the love we have for our families and friends with the presents we give…and the presents we get…at Christmas.

That’s part of our Christmas celebration,too.

Christmas is pretty cool all the way around.

I can “hold onto” that thought for a lifetime.

“Don’t turn Me into memory or myth.”

“Real” is a song by Nichole Nordeman.

I’ve been listening to a course on Philosophy lately while I deliver the mail.

I don’t get it.  It’s all these puzzles and tricky words and it makes my head spin.

That’s not a good thing while I’m delivering the mail.

It’s one of those deals where I think that I must think that if I listen to it enough times, at some point it will all click and I’ll understand it.

I don’t think that I’ll understand it.

I think I’ll go back to listening to the rest of my audio Bible…finish up the New Testament.

Maybe the book of “Revelations” will make more sense than that Philosophy course.

I have a ways to go before I get there.

I was listening to the Bible the other day…and I heard the story of Zacchaeus.

That dude was like an early superhero to all us little Sunday school kids when I was growing up.

We had the little song…and the story was strong.

Now, an adult is going to read all the subtext and “philosophy” and theology and everything else they can attach to the story of Zacchaeus.

We can’t let a good thing alone…adults need to blab about stuff until we fill in all the holes…maybe until we fill in all the holes with observations that might not even be warranted.

We will expend a lot of energy describing how our faith is like the “faith of a child”…and then footnote our observations.

That’s just how we roll when we “mature”.

But, as a child, I think that what I heard was that Zacchaeus, a “little man”, a guy who wasn’t extremely popular with the people in his community, was so anxious to hear what Jesus was saying that he climbed a tree to see and hear Jesus speak.

That works for a little kid.

That works on so many simple levels.

First…he’s little.

What child wouldn’t relate to that?

Then…he climbs that tree.

That is a cool move…smart…climbing that tree.  He couldn’t climb up on his parent’s shoulders….he needed some other leg up to see Jesus. He had to climb the tree.

He needed to pop up out of his comfort zone a little.

He needed to work for it.

And then Jesus comes through, sees him up in the tree, and says, “Hey…Zacchaeus…come on down out of that tree.  I’m going to eat at your house tonight.”

BAM!!!!  Instant superhero.

The little guy gets the brass ring and his “cool factor” goes through the roof.

Zacchaeus was the original “Little Big Man”.

That’s the song that we used to sing.

In that Philosophy course, they say things like, “If this is this, and that is that, then this must be that when this and that are seen through… the amber piece of rock candy that Chief Dan George holds up in that Clint Eastwood movie, the one where he says, ‘It’s not for eating…it’s for looking through..’. Therefore A equals B when viewed from the perspective of the ancient Etruscans…blah, blah, blah.”

It doesn’t really mention an Indian with a piece of rock candy…I made that part up.

That stuff makes my head hurt…all the “this and that’s and therefores”.

The story of Zacchaeus was dead-on straightforward.

A little guy climbs the tree because he wanted to see Jesus…and Jesus notices his efforts and says, “We’re eating together tonight.”

I love a straightforward story sometimes.

If I ever get a philosophy course together, I’ll have to remember to include “If Zacchaeus climbs a tree…and superheroes also fly…then it stands to reason that because Zacchaeus approaches the sky, Zacchaeus must therefore also be a superhero.”

That would work for a child.

It works for me.

OK, so here’s a weird hypothetical situation I was thinking about this morning.

A “what if” that I can fill up a page writing about.

A hail mary blog topic that might get me inspired enough to make my 500 word quota.

What if…what if we were like “pay as you go” phones…except we could never be refilled?

What if we had a measured and predefined number of words…given to us at birth,  concrete once the number had set…that couldn’t be changed and that, once they ran out, were gone forever?

What if we couldn’t call customer service when they were gone?

What if we didn’t have access to any minute cards that could get us up and talking again?

What if I started every sentence with “what if” for the rest of the blog?

That would be hard to take.

I won’t do that.

So in the context of that idea, imagine a set of parents, in a delivery room, making those short calls to all the relatives to let them know how everything turned out.

They might call to tell them, “Yeah…it’s a girl.  No….everything’s alright…yeah, it’s good.  She has blue eyes…right, blue.  A kazillion…YES!!!! A KAZILLION!!!!  This little girl is going to be a real talker!  Thankyou!  I know….we were so excited, too.  Well, I’m not going to keep you…hate to use up your words…yes, we were excited, too….thankyou.  Bye.”

That would be a good call to get.

But there would be the kind of call that reported minutes in the thousands, too.

That would be sad.

You’d have to exercise a lot of restraint in how you used your words if the end of them were that close.

You’d have to have family and friends around who were blessed with a surplus of words who were good at interpreting body language.

Or maybe you’d have to become a really good texter.

That doesn’t use up the words as fast.

It would be a good and legitimate excuse when you wanted to shorten a phone call, though.

To be able to say, “I really can’t talk right now….I’m bumping up against my word count ceiling.  Send me an email” would be helpful.

It would be helpful…and tragic at the same time.

We talk and talk and talk.  It’s fun to talk.  Drink some coffee and get the gears lubed up a little….and we can get a conversation party started.

For the most part, we don’t have any limits now to the number of words we’ll go through in a lifetime.

We can say whatever we want. We can say “whatever we want” twice, if we want to.

There’s no harm in using our words.  There’s more where that came from.

I’ll bet a quiet person uses a million words…somebody who almost never talks, over the course of a lifetime, probably uses a bunch of words….like a million or something.  Lots of words.  And that’s just a quiet person.  Imagine how many words the “motormouths” use?

Holy Smokes.

We don’t know how many words we use.  Who’s keeping track, after all?

If we had a finite number of words, assigned at birth, not defined by social status or genetics or race or gender….not defined by anything that might normally give someone a “leg up” in this world…if our “word count” was huge…but still limited…how careful would that make us with what we said and how often we said it?

Our days are numbered already.  We enjoy, hopefully, what we have.  We love….we share…we interact. While we’re here, hopefully, we’re good to each other. Hopefully, we use our words wisely.

Unlimited words are a good thing…what if we had something to say? What if we needed our words?

What if we actually had something that needed to be said?  It would be good to have the words to do it with.

But what do I know?  I’m just hanging out here on “Pleasure Island”…growing my donkey ears and hoping to turn into a real boy someday.

I hope nobody turns it all into something harder than it already is.

FREE WORDS FOR EVERYBODY!!

that I stood at the front of an old Episcopal church in Asheville, NC and watched Jenny walk down the aisle in a beautiful white dress.

Today’s the day we got married.

Twenty years ago today.

Now we sleep with a baby between us.

That’s happened before…that we had a baby sleeping between us.

It’s something we are getting used to.

I think it would be smart to stop having babies by the time I’m 90.

That’s not so romantic to talk about on our 20th anniversary.

I look back a lot…I look back like I could figure out a path if my rearview mirror was clean enough.

I look back, and remember, and ponder…and I don’t really come to any understanding that really does much for me.

Most of the time, things are just as fuzzy as when I started my pondering.

One thing that is crystalline pure clear is that I couldn’t imagine a “me” without “them”.

I can’t do it anymore.

I know that I couldn’t imagine a me without her.

I met Jenny at a Christmas party 3 years before we were married.

I’d just moved to Asheville to start a job at a backpacking store.  It was part of my master plan, resume-building job adventure…and I’d only worked there a couple of weeks.

Jenny had just moved out with her family from Colorado and was on a first “date” with one of my co-workers at the store.

I thought the top of my head was going to pop off when I bent down to look in the car window to say hello.

Who was this girl? Why was my universe vibrating to a different frequency just because I looked in the window of a friend’s car…and there she was?

I spent the rest of the evening trying to spend time with her…without appearing to steal my friend’s “date”.

Stealthy and shy amore….glances at my future before I understood what a future could be.

Then the party was over, and after a “it was nice to meet you” handshake, we didn’t see each other again ….

for three years.

We’d met once…just that one time, and….I remembered her name was Jenny.  I remembered her…but didn’t think I’d ever see her again.

Until…I saw a girl with a black hat and a long black coat walking at the mall with her little sister.

It was HER!!!!  HER!!!!

Her.

She told me later that I scared her with my staring.

I thought I was being kind of “super-sleuthy” hiding behind a magazine.

Anyway, long story short, I got her number, we dated for a year, got married…then bip, bip, bip, bip….and we’re a family.

Wow.

That’s the story in a nutshell.

It’s not the complete story, though.

I can’t write the complete story in 500 words.  I don’t know how to do that.

I don’t know how to say that she moves me in 500 words.

I don’t know how to say that my universe still vibrates “better” because she’s in my life.

I can’t do that in 500 words.

Or even 513.

Thankyou for our anniversary, Jenny.