The Browniest Christmas

Charlie Brown: I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming, but I'm not happy. I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel. I just don't understand Christmas, I guess. I like getting presents and sending Christmas cards and decorating trees and all that, but I'm still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed.

Linus Van Pelt: Charlie Brown, you're the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem. Maybe Lucy's right. Of all the Charlie Browns in the world, you're the Charlie Browniest.

The opening scene to A Charlie Brown Christmas keeps running through my head, and not only because my daughter watched it in a constantly-alternating pattern with greatly inferior sequel, It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown, for several weeks leading up to the holiday. I had a rather Charlie Brown-y Christmas this year, the Charlie Browniest in quite awhile.

From an early age I have identified with Charlie Brown, and the first TV specials are a touchstone to my childhood (though I admit I started losing interest somewhere between A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown). The first portion of scripture I memorized was Linus' quotation in the Christmas special from Luke 2 (for one of my earliest attempts at being a director and staging a Christmas play), and much of my own artwork, and some of my sense of characters and dialog, were developed from copying Peanuts comics as a child.

But my problems with this Christmas are not Charlie Brown's. I'm not suffering from "pantophobia", and I certainly DON'T need more "involvement"! The commercialism of the season is not particularly vexing (any more than it has been since Charlie Brown first declared, "I won't let this commercial dog spoil MY Christmas"), and I don't need Linus to "tell me what Christmas is all about." I know all of that, at least in my head...

Charlie Brown's disappointment at not receiving Christmas cards gets more to my own feeling. I am missing people, and the human connection that I associate with the holiday season. In particular, I am missing my grandparents, around whom the holiday always revolved prior to their passing in 2003, one month apart, when my daughter was less than a year old. I don't think my family has yet figured out how to celebrate the day without them. John Irving writes in A Prayer for Owen Meany, "Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home," and that rings very true.

Missing Grandma and Grandad as people is understandable, and even I suppose admirable in some ways, but the fact of the matter is I also miss their gifts. I never figured out exactly where they got their money from, but every Christmas (at least while they were able-bodied and capable of shopping) my grandparents would go all-out, and we could count on there being a mountain of presents beneath their tree. Being together as a family was good, but most of my youth and for periods of my adulthood we lived close enough that we did that pretty much on a weekly basis. The Christmas dinner was always good and a major part of the day, but really it was just a repeat of the Thanksgiving meal a month later. No, what made Christmas unique, as far as our family gathering was concerned, was the exchange of presents, the majority of them coming from my grandparents. Without them, and with the rest of us on fixed incomes or being underemployed, no one can afford to be Santa anymore, and when Christmas is mostly about presents, the death of Santa leaves a serious hole in the holiday.

I don't want or believe Christmas to be all about presents. There is much that I do by myself, with my wife and daughter, and with my church in worship and service that are clearly more focused on the spiritual reality of Christ's birth and the day that celebrates it. But getting together with my mother, sister and aunt, it is hard not to lapse into those expectations of Christmas Past when we could see how much we were loved by how much money someone spent on us. And it's hard not to want to do for my daughter what was done for me (wrapped in the haze of happy nostalgia as it is), even though I can now see the folly of it.

So, this is an area where my character needs development...

Of Bradley and Broccoli

Some of the best "character bits" in fiction are inspired by observing real-life exchanges. Sitting in a local restuarant with my family over the weekend, I overheard a conversation--or rather, a monolog--which I would love to draw on if I were writing a play about sibling rivalry or family estrangement. Behind me was a young father with his two children, a 2-year-old girl with light curls in a high chair at the end of the table, and a dark haired boy of about 8 (wearing a dark expression) in the opposite booth.

They caught my attention when I overheard the father suddenly gush, "Did you say 'BROCCOLI'? Did you HEAR that, Bradley? She said 'BROCCOLI'! Wasn't that PRECIOUS? Say it again, dear! ...YES! That is BROCC-O-LI! ...Do you LIKE that BROCCOLI? ...Does it taste GOOD! ...No? Do you want to put that BROCCOLI in Bradley's HAIR? Isn't that CUTE?! Oh, DON'T make a face like that, Bradley--she isn't HURTING you! What am I DOING? I'm calling GRANDMA on my CELL PHONE! Yes I AM! And then you can say 'BROCCOLI' for GRANDMA! Mom! Hi! Guess what your granddaughter just did? ...No, she just said, 'broccoli'! ...No, 'BROCCOLI'. REALLY! Listen! Go ahead, dear! Say it! Say, 'BROCCOLI'! Say it! 'BROCC-O-LI'! Go ahead! You can do it! ..."

[I'm tempted here to lapse into a Bill Cosby routine: "Eight hours later: 'Hang in there, Mom! Drink some coffee, walk around! Come on, Erica, say "Hello"!' Wouldn't do it! Finally hung up the phone, and as soon as I did, she started, 'HELLO! HELLO! HELLO!' THAT'S my girl..."]

In the restaurant, though, all I could think about was Bradley five or ten years from now in therapy discussing why he never felt loved or accepted by his father, and why he has troubles in his relationships with women, his sister in particular.

So much of family strife and an individual's struggle with identity begins early in life with parents who just aren't aware of the messages they are communicating. While on the one level I found this Dad's enthusiasm with his daughter's expanding vocabulary goofy and endearing, I think there was definitely some potential damage being done in the relationship between father and son. And as a parent I need to heed the lesson of keeping my enthusiasm and obsessions in check where they might unwittingly harm my relationship with my child.

If I were to draw on this experience creatively, I might use it in the opening scene to a play dealing with adult siblings trying to wrestle with the brokenness in their relationships with each other and with their parents. They could meet in a restaurant, where this scene was taking place in the background, offering comic relief but also reinforcing and maybe shedding some light on how family relationships break down in the first place. [Shades of the Logician in Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros...]

"I Just Want to Be a Sheep"

Tomorrow is our Christmas pageant, and once again I have been asked to direct (after the upper-level Sunday School class decided on a script and casting). And once again we have integrated the younger classes' performance of a traditional pageant into the larger production. Last year we had an odd detective/time travel piece, which involved the main character actually interviewing Mary and Joseph, but this year the older kids are doing an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's story of the shoemaker who is told Jesus will visit him, only to have the Lord show up in the poor people he helps throughout the day. The pageant only happens in his mind as he reads the Gospel story, so there is no need for any of the biblical characters to speak.

One five-year-old girl in our church we knew had been pining for the role of Mary, and this situation made it possible for us to offer it to her. We were excited about it, her parents were excited about it, and we were certain she would be excited about it, but when her Dad told her she could be the mother of Jesus, she surprised him by saying, "I think I'd rather just be a sheep." She's since changed her mind and will be appearing as Mary tomorrow (if all goes well and stage-fright doesn't strike again), but it got me and my wife thinking, "What if Gabriel had gotten that response?"

"Hail, highly favored one! The Spirit of the Lord will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you, and the holy one to be born of you will be called the Son of God!"

"Nah, thanks anyways, but I think I'd rather just be a sheep!"

Since God knows the end from the beginning, and knows our response before he makes an offer, it seems unlikely he sent Gabriel to other girls, but if he had, how many would have turned him down? How many would have turned down the role of Theotokos just to keep their ordinary lives and forgo the attention, the notoriety, the misunderstanding and the sorrow of being the mother of Jesus.

She must have been a very special girl!

Milestone 7

Last night was the Christmas party and closing program for KidzLife, the elementary-aged children's outreach program I am in charge of at our church. This was the seventh semester we had run the program (and our fourth Christmas party), and things went incredibly smoothly, from the opening meal through the distribution of gift bags as the end. Praise be to God!

I was asked yesterday morning what lesson God had been teaching me in 2008, and without giving the question much thought I said, "Something to do with the fact that I'm not infinite; dealing with limits and allowing others to do what God has called them to do." Last night was a confirmation of that. I actually had little to do last night, other than act as M.C. and introduce various people who offered prayers, led the singing, reviewed the lessons and memory verses, and so forth. The biggest blessing to me, and I think to everyone there, was a presentation of the Christmas story using Godly Play, done by a young girl who is part of our leadership team. While some of the kids were acting up and some of the adults were talking during other parts of the night, she had the room's undivided attention as she introduced cut-out characters and placed them on the road to Bethlehem, and led us to "wonder" what it was like to be there the night that Christ was born.

On the down side, when we lined up the children to receive their gifts at the end, it was abundantly clear that our male attendance has dropped dramatically in this academic year. I know that we are now in competition with a Boy Scout troop that meets the same night, but I'm not sure what to do about that.

We start again on Shrove Tuesday, which is the last Tuesday in February this year. On the one hand, I don't like having that big of a gap between semesters, but on the other hand, we don't seem to be able to keep interest in the program beyond 15 weeks at a stretch, and I think we may need all of that time to prepare for the next session. I am feeling led to explore Daniel and Revelation with the kids (in very broad strokes), and to do the weekly dramas with puppets (which all need to be created from scratch!).