Be Still My Morning

Still. It was disconcertingly still this morning when I got up. The hour was earlier than it maybe should have been, a product of an unusual holiday schedule at work. Instead of having an unofficial half day on Friday and getting Monday completely off, we had Friday off and were supposed to put in a “Skeleton Day” on Monday. For the people at my work who know enough about what they’re doing to answer phone calls from customers, that means they basically only needed to manage their phone shift (the part of the day where you accept new incoming support requests via phone, email or web sumbission).

For me, a guy who has no idea what he’s doing and, frankly, is pretty useless at the moment, I struggled to determine what I could do to put in my part of the Skeleton Day. My boss had suggested that it wasn’t necessary for me to come into the office. “Read some manuals,” he said. This morning I realized fairly quickly that while there were a few manuals to read, leisurely perusing technical documentation isn’t very supportive of the other team members who are actually putting in effort. I tried to get some kind of installation work done, setting up test suites for the new version of the product that my co-workers don’t have time to do. It’s educational and it makes me feel at least marginally useful. But alas, without proper VPN access or even a PC to my name, I cannot reach the test suite servers from home.

I don’t know why the world was so calm this morning. Eight-thirty doesn’t seem unreasonably early to me, but on this day it seemed like the whole State was sound asleep as I stared briefly out the window and onto the rain-soaked pavement below. Perhaps it was the recovery from the bustle of the Christmas shopping and family visits and travel arrangements and wound-up children taut with anticipation. It could be that nearly everyone else in the county had today off instead of Friday and all were taking advantage by sleeping in.

I turned away from the window and stared back into the apartment, filled with boxes and bags bulging and overflowing with an assortment of gifts and trinkets. It was a good Christmas, full of family and laughter and thoughtful gifts. In a true sense the oft-cited but rarely understood spirit of Christmas had been something I felt I could safely say was palpable. Whether one chooses to largely exclude the original message of the Christmas season or not—and regardless of my personal feelings on that matter—there is at least one set of ideals that those who try to glean a deeper understanding of the holiday beyond the greed and commercialism can identify and seek. The message of Christmas no matter the motivation remains: Peace, Kindness, Friendship, Joy and most importantly, Hope.

See, I think that whether you want to admit it or not, the message that the Christmas Story (no, not the one with Peter Billingsley, the other one, with the manger…) truly represents is that there is Hope. As people struggle to remember what it is to have Hope, the story of Christmas shows how Jesus came to bring Hope to a small family, to a town, to a people, to all people. Likewise as we try to capture the elusive Christmas Spirit and we ideally visualize a world of peace, where people do things—kind things, little things—for each other, no matter what or why but just because “It’s Christmas” and where we make a concerted effort to recognize the people in our lives that really matter and focus on how these tiny little shifts in attitude and attention can lead to joy and happiness for ourselves and those around us, I think people forget that the point of all that is to try and imagine what it would be like if people acted this way all the time, not just for a few weeks at the end of the year. That’s Hope. If we can do it for a little while, we wish—we Hope—it could last and last.

And when you get right down to it, the basic thrust of Jesus’s story and his message was (loosely paraphrsed), “Let’s all have the Christmas Spirit all the time.” What if Christmas wasn’t a special event? What if Christmas was just, like, Tuesday?

Religious or not, I think we could all get behind that.

Loot

So perhaps I finally sorta understand this whole gift-giving thing. No, I’m not getting all soft and squishy on you; I’m still a cynical jerk who thinks that too much of Christmas is fabricated by FAO Schwartz and the National Retail Federation, but I at least understand the appeal of giving gifts a little better this year. Receiving gifts has never been much of a problem for me except in that it has typically proposed an uncomfortable reciprocation circumstance that I don’t much care for.

And it really isn’t that I’m a cheapskate. Well, that isn’t the whole story. When it comes to money I don’t mind spending it on other people, but I dislike what I perceived as a sort of one-upsmanship type of game involved that, most likely (and this is confirmed by my wife) exists only in my head. But I’m delusional and socially crippled enough to stress out over it. What that means is that gift-giving becomes a proposition of cataclysmic proportions as I must find the perfect gift for everyone. The cliché “It’s the thought that counts” never meant much to me because I worried that if that was all that counted and I put maybe fifteen seconds worth of thought into someone’s gift, then what it really counted for was essentially bupkis.

Maybe things were helped this year by having Nikki do the lion’s share of the shopping. I made an effort to be involved in the process, both so that I could see how it was done by watching a master at work and also so I wouldn’t end up in one of those situations where I watch someone unwrap a gift intensely that I ostensibly gave them because I am as clueless as they are what it might be until they take the wrapping paper off.

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