'Tis the Season

by
Elizabeth W. Bennefeld

It is the season when everything gets a little weird. Outside of shopping for presents for half a dozen relatives, though, I don't let it get to me...too much. More than anything else, the winter holiday season is simply exhausting, if I let it dictate my schedule.

For many years, by the end of December I would take to my bed (or, more accurately, to my bathtub, where I would sit beneath the hot shower, until I could actually breathe without pain) with a massive case of bronchitis, and not emerge again until halfway through February.

It has been twenty-two Christmases since I last worked in a corporate setting, where the dust and fumes and paper-and-ink particles in the air made me ill and hysterical, and I don't miss it one bit. (That's something to be thankful for, this holiday season!) It has been nine or ten years since I subjected myself to a Christmas church service with its pine trees (allergies), candles (vertigo) and young and old dressed to the nines in their Sunday best, complete with incense, perfumes, and aftershaves (panic attacks and the occasional case of blood poisoning). "'Twas the season" to end up in the hospital, were that not such a threat to the health!

The season is much safer, these days. Outings are limited to a few hours at each of the two family celebrations, one on Christmas Eve and the other Christmas Day. And to compensate for the two days in a row of being around lots of people and cooking smells, I now take the weeks of Christmas and New Year's Day as vacation time.

Meditation time, really! As the winter really settles in, with more than three months of ice and snow and cold before me, I feel grounded. Both limited in activities and thoroughly in touch with the rhythms of nature's cycle of seasons. I love the cold and the peace and the refraining from activities. There is time to reflect on past and present and to contemplate the future that stretches out, ever shorter, before me.

I had not thought, when in my teens and twenties, about what it would be like to complete so many years of life. Sixty, next year! And who would have thought that each year, once past age forty, would be so much better than the last? My health is better--no more bursitis or pain in the joints limiting my activities. I know what makes me ill, and so I can avoid those things with the result that I sleep soundly each night and wake rested. The agonies of decision making are diminished, too, as I remember that there are no perfect outcomes, but merely the trading of one set of gains and losses for another.

I have also come to terms with the uncertainties of life and now anticipate the wonders of the unexpected that life delivers. What a marvelous thing, the spontaneity and unpredictability of life! No matter how terrible the event, there always is some hidden gift to remind me of God's continuing love.

'Tis the season to recall that we who live in Him will never die, and even those who die will still live. A season of awe!