Bring it on!

I know Christmas is coming soon because at the end of this week we have a break in the school calendar. But when you live outside of the United States, and especially in a predominantly Muslim country, there are just not many reminders of the approaching Christmas holidays. So any little glimmer of Christmas is noted, welcomed and appreciated.

The other day in the faculty lounge several of us commented how strange it was to be thick into December and not hear the ever-present soundtrack of carols in every store, see the advertisements suggesting how to show your loved ones how deeply you treasure them, or hear the strange, “it’s that time of year!!” mantra. We sighed as we thought about how when something is gone, you miss all the Christmas-y touches and hoopla even more. One colleague shared, “But three days after we’re back I’m sure all the commercialization and burden of Christmas will get to me.” I exclaimed, “Hey, Christmas overload!!! Bring it on!”

These colleagues actually turned and looked a little puzzled at me since such he-man comments as “bring it on” rarely pop out of my mouth. They looked so puzzled—had I just been morphing into a jock talking smack about some other team??? I laughed and said I was practicing my mock-coach talk, actually, since there was a inter-dorm soccer game scheduled for that afternoon to stoke the fires of competition and rivalry. I had conferred with Arthur and Julianne as to how to yell those, you know, barbed sports-like phrases at Meissa dorm so I could help rally my Nihal dorm to a he-man victory. They gave me a couple go-to phrases so I could, you know, sound like I knew what I was doing cheering on the sidelines of the game. (By the way, at one time there was talk of me being a substitute in the game as well!).

I stopped by my faculty box, and lo and behold, I spy a piece of real mail. You have to understand—I get maybe one piece of real mail a month. Don’t feel too bad for me—most days I average about 100 emails (a day!) on the school email server! But the mailman in Madaba brought me a Christmas card! And, especially since we had just been missing Christmas, the card brought me a great smile. It was from the Canterinos—one of those golden families from Hackley, and since it was likely to be the only Christmas card I get this month here, it was especially sweet. I taught their son Joseph a decade ago, but we have never lost touch, and their generosity and humor have always been a pleasure. Margie Canterino was always the first to get her Christmas cards in the mail—it almost always arrived exactly on December 1 when I lived in New York. Her wish was always that premier wish for a joyous season. Yesterday when I got her card, it made me feel what maybe we all feel the first time of the season when we hear a beloved carol or do something Christmas-y.

I realize that for many of you the Christmas season must be like playing in a real-live Survivor saga of who can run the gauntlet of parties and shopping sprees and holiday madness. But when those things are few and far between—again, I say, “bring it on!”

I have seen two Christmas trees this month—one in a Chinese restaurant last Thursday evening in Amman, and one in an administrator’s house on campus. Both trees looked a little like stand-ins for that tree in the Charlie Brown Christmas special. But since those are the only trees I have seen so far this season, I just fill in the blanks on what I miss. I remember details from our family Christmas trees—the ornaments that have survived from our family’s genesis in the 1960s the rigors and ravages of time. I smile at the strange, trendy ornaments we added to the motley collection in the 1980s and 1990s. I remember the makeshift trees when my mother was in the hospital in Decembers past. I remember the oddest tree of all the year that I was in the body cast in childhood and I decorated the tree myself—putting the ornaments as high up as my little-boy arms could reach from the body cast on the avocado green living room carpet.

The dorm soccer show-down was great. I yelled and copped my best coach stance from the sidelines as I watched our dorms have the most inter-dorm fun I have seen here. One of our other teachers, Ryugi, has been great at cultivating the kind of dorm-love and dorm-obsession, and dorm-rivalries that define boarding schools. He was the brains behind this, and it was good fun.

I ran over from the game (by the way, my dorm dominated, I CAN’T HEAR YOU—DOMINATED the game until the last few seconds. Yeah, a penalty kick cost us the game at 3-2) to a Lessons and Carols job that some of the Christian students had helped put together. Again, when you don’t hear these songs as much, it is more fun than usual with the Santa songs and the familiar carols. Jordan is a very moderate, tolerant country, and Christians can worship easily—it’s just that we are small in number, only about 6% of the total population. As we came to the line in “Do You Hear What I Hear,” that goes, “He will bring us goodness and light,” I hadn’t quite gotten out of my sports persona, and I almost yelled out, “Bring it on!” However, I just sang along instead.

Some of the seniors who are Christians read the passages from Luke, and it reminded me again of that Charlie Brown special when Linus reads the familiar text. He starts with “Lights, please,” and reads about Mary, and “in those days” and decrees and a baby in a manger in Bethlehem. Since it is the first Christmas since I actually have been to the town of Bethlehem, I felt strangely closer to the Christmas story. Last March I was in Jerusalem and took a public bus out to Manger Square and walked around processing the sights and thinking of the song my sister and I sang last Christmas Eve, “Not That Far From Bethlehem.” Interesting stuff going on in my head.

As Fadi and Ghassan and Lawrence and Tareq read about the angel visiting Mary, I thought about how startling it would be to have a run-in with an angel. No wonder the first thing an angel says is the predictable, “Fear, not!” Anyone who knows their Bible knows that 99 times out of a 100 when humans run into angels the first words out of the angel’s mouth are always, “Do not be afraid.”

This could reflect on angels, I guess, but maybe it just says something about the state in which angels typically find us: afraid. You could forgive angels for smelling out fear a mile away. After all, fear seems to be a constant companion for us. Our ancestors lived in fear about food and shelter. All these millennia later, despite the frozen meat section in your grocery store, we still live in a state of fear. These last 18 months or so we have been terrified about the global financial markets collapsing and empty retirement accounts. And before that, we were terrified by terror, and anthrax, and the Cold War. Some of our Americans are terrified of Barack Obama. Some are terrified of Sarah Palin.

But as Ghassan read the familiar passage of “Don’t be afraid” from the angel to Mary, an unmarried teen-ager, I thought…hmmm… I wonder if it ever crossed Mary’s mind to retort, “Easy for you to say!”

A student sang the song, “Born to Die,” which made my mind race to the Resurrection and the angel who greeted the women at the tomb with the same, “Don’t be afraid.” Of course those women had just a number of hours earlier witnessed the Resurrection, and they are asked not to be afraid?

How in the world do we manage all this fear? Our seniors are afraid about college acceptances. Some of us are afraid of the sustainability of this grand experiment in the desert, and the list really is almost endless. Of course the fears that plague all of us can hardly be overcome by the words of the angel who proposes to instruct us: “Don’t be afraid.”

But hearing the carols, seeing the card, remembering Christmases past without the tyranny of over-doing Christmas, it becomes quite an antidote to the fears as the promise of the season whispers to us to manage our fears. Indeed, ours is a faulty, fragile, fractious world, and these are disconcerting days and weeks.

In the absence of the Christmas onslaught you have to make Christmas for yourself. I take the one card, the two trees and the odd lot of carols, and look anew at the unexpected wisdom in the Christmas child—an infant who knocks at the doors of our heart.

Ahhhhh….Christmas! Yeah, baby—bring it on!