Holiday Mystery

As annual winter festivities grow closer and closer, the spirit of the unknown has begun to consume me with the holiday spirit. Now our den is filling with that wonderful evergreen aroma mixed with some peppermint and warm cookies wafting in from the kitchen. The red on my face slowly retreats from my cheeks as I step from the blistering cold into the confines of my home. Since the weather outside is frightful, the fire of home is so delightful, and the warmth of family becomes sweeter and sweeter. School work is more and more forgotten, as the callings of a good novel and some chilled eggnog pull me from numbers and symbols into a world of fiction.

Walking out of my white garage, I enter into the bleak atmosphere of white sky and brown trees whose leaves have fled into the pile in our coul-de-sac. The once vibrant yellows and reds have been washed from the panorama, and the Great Artist paints with new emotions--desolation with a hint of homeliness. Christmastime is the season of home and family. Outside our wooden front door, Nature's beast rears its ugly head to form a sneering glare; he challenges us to face him and his icy breath or his spindly fingers as barren trees. We celebrate, enjoy our company, and feast ourselves on the chocolate, the gravy, the peppermint, the ginger bread and hundreds of other flavors, never once finding need to fear the depression of our winter surroundings. Riding home from school today lost in Coldplay's ethereal landscapes, I felt.

My warm Buick was suddenly attacked by a torrent of emotion, in which I felt the great Holiday mystery. How can we be so warm, when everywhere it is cold? Our hands are warmed by the quiet blaze in the hearth, our stomachs by the dark heat of hot chocolate and flavored coffee, and our hearts by the company of our dearest friends and family. There is no question that we are warm, but there is such danger! Nature pounds on my door and breaks into my house to steal warmth and happiness, to compromise those things for which we fought so dearly with our central heating system. It is, however, not the defeat of warmth when we feel this cold, for cold is really the absense of heat. Cold does not exist!! To this, we must applaud, for the Great Artist has no true enemy, no foe to hold him back. Cold is not real, and that is what we celebrate.

Evil is simply the absense of good, and God is omnipresent. There is no chance for cold darkness when we are wrapped in the love of Papa. The Holiday mystery is but the mystery of godliness--how our Great Lover choses to enclose us with his great arms, no matter how cold me might be. He absorbs our cold, so that we might be warm. I don't understand, but I love it. Just like I love the holidays.

nate.