Best Christmas… Ever!
While everyone was back home, wrapping their pipes, calling their relatives to say goodbye and preparing for Wintermageddan, we took my five-year-old granddaughter up to Calloway Gardens to see the annual Fantasy in Lights show this week.
She is at that stage in life where everything is the ‘best ever!’
This year it was pretty dang frigid up in Pine Mountain but that didn’t keep my granddaughter from sticking her head out the car’s sunroof to gaze up at the lights and once again declare that this was the ‘Best Christmas Ever!’
She said that phrase several times over and over again throughout the night. And it got me thinking.
What was my best Christmas ever?
Automatically, most people would go to that year when they got the most presents. Or the year they got that one really big thing that their parents had worked all year or gone into to debt to buy.
That is usually the American definition of Best Christmas Ever.
But not for me.
It was the Christmas I spent in a homeless shelter.
When my children were young, my beautiful wife and I decided one year to forgo a bunch of presents and give them an ‘experience’ instead. We had a family meeting and asked the kids where they wanted to go.
“Disneyworld!” “Paris!” “The North Pole!”
We finally settled upon Washington, DC. I had a little influence on that choice. I had been to our nation’s capital a couple times before and remember how fascinating it was- especially the Smithsonian Museums.
And the great part was, unlike Disneyworld or the Eiffel Tower, admission to all of Smithsonian’s museums and exhibits are completely free.
I like free.
This seemed to excite our children, even when we told them that the only thing we would require of them to earn this expensive trip would be that on Christmas itself, we would have to spend at least part of our day doing something for others.
They were cool with that. So, my wife went online and started looking.
She found a bunch of places where you could volunteer but the one that we finally settled on was a homeless shelter that was just around the corner from the White House.
I found it quite ironic that the most powerful man in the world lived in a mansion with a team of professional chefs and just a few hundred feet away, people lived in cardboard boxes and ate scraps out of garbage cans.
We flew up to Washington a couple of days before Christmas and went to the museums and monuments. And then came Christmas morning.
Time to go to work.
The homeless shelter had let its staff take Christmas Day off to be with their families. Their duties would be taken over by volunteers from the community and, as the women we spoke to on the phone said, they were in desperate need of volunteers and were grateful to have us.
By the time we got to the shelter, some of the other volunteers had already been there for hours, cooking big pots of soup and making PBJ sandwiches.
They assigned me to help with the cooking and my wife and kids to get the seating area ready to serve the meals.
We joined right in and were welcomed by a big group of mainly white, upper middle class-looking folks who were laughing and seemed to know each other.
They asked me who I was and I told them I was from Georgia and that we decided to forgo giving Christmas presents this year and spend that money on a trip.
And then something happened I did not expect.
One of the women in the group hugged me and told me that I was the best Christian she had ever met.
I was the one to laugh then. I had only known these people for five minutes and I was most certainly not the best Christian she had ever met.
Not even close.
And then I saw the pendant hanging around her neck. It was a Star of David.
She was Jewish. All of these people were Jewish.
Well, now if made sense. They didn’t celebrate Christmas so coming down here to serve the homeless was just like any other Thursday to them.
But it wasn’t just another day.
This was supposed to be the day when us Christians had our ‘Super Bowl.’ When we were supposed to celebrate the birth of Christ who came to not only save us from our sins but also taught compassion, mercy and love for everyone regardless of their race, creed, religion or deeds.
The homeless and the Jews.
When the woman saw the puzzled look on my face, she explained.
“We’re all from Kesher Israel, the synagogue a few blocks west of here. We’ve been coming down here to serve the homeless on Christmas morning for more than twenty years now. And in all that time, we have never had a Christian join us.”
I knew what she was implying.
On the day when us Christians were supposed to be really living our faith, we were too busy at home opening Christmas presents and celebrating Santa than to bother coming down to the homeless shelter to take care of the less fortunate.
We let the Jews do it.
I will be honest with you, the older I get, the less and less I like Christmas.
The holiday becomes more and more commercialized every year and becomes less and less about the birth of Jesus.
And the more that happens, the harder and harder my heart grows. Very much like the Grinch.
I look at the holiday from afar and think, is this all there is? Is ripping through a mound of expensive presents and then just sitting around and looking at each other or taking a nap really what Christmas is supposed to be?
Or are my Jewish friends from Kesher Israel really the ones who are doing more ‘celebrating’ than me by showing up and serving soup to the homeless because none of us holy Hebrews can be bothered.
My best Christmas was not the day I got a train set when I was four years old. Or the year my wife bought me a new recliner.
It was the time I spent pouring soup into bowls at a homeless shelter with a bunch of Jews.
That is the one that melted my cold heart.
