Building Cathedrals
If you had been spending too much time on the computer already, tinkering with photos, if you had given in to the afternoon blahs and had a cup of coffee, if your husband called to let you know he was working late, if he called again to let you know he had decided to skip the commute and sleep at your mother’s, if you were approaching your routine monthly week of insomnia anyway, if all of these things were happening to you, you might find yourself blogging in a quiet house at 1 am, acknowledging that anyone in their right mind who lived in a house with six children would sleep anytime they slept, and you would be awfully glad that your children were going to spend the next morning at a pajama themed birthday party, meaning that they do not have to get dressed and also will not be here to experience the grumpiness, if all of these things were happening, it just might be worth it to find this Chesterton quote:
The only explanation people had was that a being called Santa Claus was somehow kindly disposed toward him. “We believed,” he wrote, that a certain benevolent person “did give us those toys for nothing. And … I believe it still. I have merely extended the idea.
“Then I only wondered who put the toys in the stocking; now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in the room, and the room in the house, and the house on the planet, and the great planet in the void.
“Once I only thanked Santa Claus for a few dolls and crackers, now I thank him for stars and street faces and wine and the great sea. Once I thought it delightful and astonishing to find a present so big that it only went halfway into the stocking.
“Now I am delighted and astonished every morning to find a present so big that it takes two stockings to hold it, and then leaves a great deal outside; it is the large and preposterous present of myself, as to the origin of which I can offer no suggestion except that Santa Claus gave it to me in a fit of peculiarly fantastic good will.”
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