CHRISTMAS DISAPPOINTMENT [F, 1-5-24]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—CHRISTMAS DISAPPOINTMENT [F, 1-5-24]

 

Another Christmas, another disappointment. We work so hard to get ready, we anticipate so much, and then… As my mother-in-law always said, “There’s nothing as over as Christmas.”

I was ten years old, almost eleven, when I experienced my first real Christmas disappointment.

It was my first Christmas after we moved from Indianapolis to the farm, my first Christmas at my beloved little open-country Forsythe Methodist Church. In the Willing Workers Sunday School class, we drew names for the Christmas program gift exchange. The conclusion of the program was the appearance of Santa, who made sure that everyone there got a gift. Mostly it was handing out the gifts from the name draws in the Sunday School classes. There were folks there, though, who were not in SS classes, so Santa was prepared. He had some gag gifts, like a hairbrush for a bald man. Mostly the non-exchangers got a green or red pencil that said Merry Christmas on the tube.

I waited eagerly, to see what I would get. I had put quite a bit of thought and almost all my meager savings into buying for the boy whose name I had drawn. But after Santa had finished up, I still was empty-handed. I didn’t even get a pencil. If Santa noticed me there at all, sitting in a pew with my classmates, he assumed that I had gotten something in the exchange.

I was embarrassed and ashamed. Yes, a strange reaction. I could have been angry. Perhaps I was a little bit. But primarily I was ashamed. Whenever anything went wrong, I assumed it was my fault.

I’d been taught that. Not intentionally, exactly, although one of my mother’s most-used phrases was, “Look what you made me do!” Whenever she made a mistake, it was because someone, usually me, had distracted her. My father wasn’t as vocal as Mother, but he said nothing to me unless it was to point out what I had done wrong, and it was never said patiently.

Sometimes we avoid disappointment by having no expectations, giving up hope.

You’re never too old to be disappointed by Christmas, which means you’re never too old to be disappointed by life.

So, years later, I recycled that experience. I wrote a story that started with an eleven-year-old boy suffering the exact disappointment I had. But his mother taught him, through an act of selfless love, that Christmas is a mirror. It reflects back to us the spirit we bring to it.

So if you had some disappointment this Christmas, if it did not live up to your expectations, recycle it, Tell yourself a story about how it might have been. Christmas is a mirror.

John Robert McFarland