It’s just past midnight on Christmas Day, and the house is quiet save for the crackling of birch logs in a fireplace. On Netflix. The children aren’t really children anymore, they’re older, but they are nestled snug in their beds. And I am keeping a promise I made several months ago.
This piece has little to do with sports or news. It has to do with Christmas.
The scene I am remembering is my childhood home, and Christmas is over, or at least the part of the day most of us associate with Christmas. The gifts have been unwrapped. The excitement has faded, and kids, groggy from waking up early after a restless night, are lying around playing with new toys while the voices of adults carry through the house. Maybe a basketball game plays on television.
I like these calmer times, always have. Some people say they feel a letdown after Christmas. But this time is the part of Christmas I value the most. Maybe it’s because the noise has dwindled and the pressure is off.
It was in just such a time that I still can remember, as a child, grabbing a basketball and holding it down next to the wood stove that heated our house, so that it would bounce well when I took it out into the cold. The job complete, I then slipped out the back door, away from the warmth and Christmas conversations. I bounded for the barn, where some previous owners had hung a basketball hoop inside.
Up the path the boy trots, gravel crunching under his feet, puffs of breath in his wake.
I’ve tried to remember more specifics of that Christmas. I can’t. But I can remember that walk to the barn, the flipping on of a drop-cord light. I can remember tossing the ball onto my makeshift court, stepping up onto a feed trough and throwing my other leg over the top rail of a stall to get to my playing spot, a space not much wider than a free-throw lane, bordered on one side by a stall for a calf and another stall we used for storage. The bare light bulb threw off fierce shadows, and a beam in the ceiling meant that shooting arc had to be at a minimum.
The boards of the barn floor were loose and uneven, except for one. How is it that I cannot remember the highlights of a holiday, but I remember a lone board in a barn floor, driven solid by a nail, on which I bounced the ball to shoot free throws? I remember pulling off my heavy coat and taking a shot. Then another.
I couldn’t have stayed very long, but certainly long enough to satisfy one of those bursts of boyhood basketball energy, long enough to feel the cold in my bones, because shooting ball in a winter coat was no way to play. Making the last shot, or maybe several last shots, I flung myself back over into the stall, climbed up and clicked off the light, and headed back to the house.
It’s possible I never even was missed. The clicking off of that light, it seems, is the shutting off of my memory.
What remains a mystery to me is how this night flickered in my memory for three decades, maybe more, before its truth shined brightly for me.
It wasn’t until five or so years ago that it struck me that what I was climbing over to play basketball that evening was, in essence, a manger. And I noted just how often over the years, while chasing ballgames, or money, or gifts, I had hopped and skipped right over the Nativity without proper remembrance, or reflection, or sometimes even notice.
Several months ago, I suffered a stroke. It was mild, as those things go. I was extremely lucky. But you can’t experience something like that without looking at things at least a little differently on the other side. For me, Christmas, and holidays in general, are some of those things.
The story of Christmas is so familiar that it is almost too familiar to most of us. Let me tell it a little differently. For me, the story of Christmas is told beautifully in the shortest verse of the Bible, Old Testament or New.
The verse is John 11:35. Jesus, whose birth is the occasion of this entire holiday, had been told of the sickness (and later death) of his friend Lazarus. He arrived four days later and was taken to Lazarus’ tomb, and was overcome with emotion. We are told in the verse, “Jesus wept.”
Why would he do that? If anyone had the ability to tell people, “Buck up, he’s gone to a better place,” Jesus did. If anyone had reason not to be sad, if Jesus was who he is billed to be, he had no cause for tears.
Yet he wept. He missed his friend. He felt for the people around him who were hurting.
This is the beauty of Christmas. If you believe the story, the Creator of the world loved it to the point of becoming a part of it. To the point of experiencing poverty and sorrow and humiliation and joy. He got hungry and tired. I like to think he loved the experience of being part of this world, food and laughter. We know he had great friendships. We also know he suffered great physical pain, and in the end, death itself.
This is Christmas. The celebration of a God who arrived on earth to walk among us. Or, if you doubt the story or don’t know what to believe, the celebration of the hope that God walked among us. Or, if you don’t believe at all, the celebration of good will, at least, or good feeling toward others.
This may not be your prevailing thought on this Christmas Day. You may be merely thinking of gifts or meals or ballgames or even just time with family. All of those things are good. God knows, it’s generally how I have operated.
But my general operations were altered recently. Don’t get me wrong, I love the season, the carols and music, the atmosphere and Christmas trees and lights. There’s nothing wrong with loving those things, like there’s nothing wrong with loving this world, My problem has been that sometimes I miss Christmas for the trees.
I don’t want to do that anymore. This determination doesn’t make me any better as a person. In fact, I’m as flawed and struggle as much as anyone whose eyes fall on these words. I’m a mess, quite often, just like everybody else. Maybe I’m just a bit more aware of that now.
Just last night, I watched a documentary that was shot at this year’s Kentucky Derby, and in the middle of it came a scene from the post-position draw. I was in the room that day. On the screen, John Asher announces the post positions, alive as ever. If we’d only known that Derby would be his last. In the mail today, a Christmas card from Eric Dewey, whose wife Carrey passed away from ALS earlier this year. The photo was of Eric and their three children. I’m thinking of the Asher family tonight, and the Deweys, and the family of Louisville police officer Diedre Mengedoht, who was killed when her cruiser was struck on I-64 on Christmas Eve. I’m thinking of the families of 15-year-old Davey Albright, who died in September of injuries suffered when he was swept into a drain pipe during a storm, and 13-year-old Ki’Anthony Tyus, who died in a car crash just a couple of days ago.
I’m thinking of the family of Terry Hutchens, a friend who covered Indiana sports for many years, who died in a car crash last week, and of friends at WDRB who lost people close to them recently.
Christmas isn’t always a celebration. For many, it is difficult beyond expression. Those people who were lost, they were gifts beyond value. And countless others. No gift under the tree, nothing they sell in stores, can begin to offer comfort. The hope of this day, however, the hope behind Christmas, can bring comfort and courage.
From the very start, the baby in the manger was in harm’s way. You put something in a feed trough, you’d better guard it, lest animals think it is there for them. To be in the world is to be in harm’s way.
This is the world, beautiful and horrible, joyful and sorrowful. Christmas is the hope and belief that, at the very least, we aren’t in it alone.
I’ve skipped over that hope far too often. Not anymore.
Merry Christmas to all. I’m so grateful for the prayers, thoughts and support so many of you have given to me in the past year. They are, for me, gifts beyond value.
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