The Glass Bauble Was Beautiful . . . God, so Beautiful

We put up the Christmas tree today and the entire time was lovely. We went to the great parking lot of trees and looked for a humble tree . . . avoiding the dreaded “proud tree.”

“A proud tree,” you ask? And there is no good explanation except to say that long ago a wise child thought she could spot a tree grown up knowing it was better than the others and that child urged us to avoid that proud tree. Since then, we have asked her to help us find a humble tree. We brought another humble tree home tonight and decorated it with singing, jesting, and wassail.

It was lovely, good, and so fragile.

Somebody could have been hateful. Somebody could have grown too old and narrow for beauty.

Thank God . . . it was lovely.

I am, God I am, thankful. The world is ugly and we made a beautiful, humble tree. At one moment, I picked up an old ornament, red with gold glitter and the top popped off, the part with the hooker (oh the Shakespearian jests!). That bauble had come to the end of its time of decoration and went where baubles go.

The beauty of a bauble is so fragile, yet we have ornaments from 31 years ago: a little man and woman in a red bed that says- “First Christmas.” We got it when we were married and now our children are older than we were the first time it went on a tree. It is fragile, a bit broken, but packed carefully every year like a sacred thing.

Knowing my kids, it will live past me and hang (someplace, sometime) on a pine tree at a Christmas when I am bones.

Beauty is so fragile, but beauty endures.

I think this because just today the alt-right attacked me with ugly memes full of racism breaking the social contract that Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, and Rosa Parks bought with their blood. It made me afraid of the right, but then later in the day the alt-left suggested that the sixty million who voted . . .badly . . . might have to die . . . because they would resist economic and sexual equality.

God help us!

Beauty is so fragile, but thank God, oddly strong. Somebody, someplace, is wrapping it in tissue paper and putting it carefully away for Christmas and Christmas will come. I will not be sad, because sorrow is trivial. The world is dark, but the darkness cannot defeat the light and the light shines forth. Angels appear and ornament the sky if all else is lost. We have the stars as signs in Heaven.

The center will hold. Christmas is coming.