This year's Christmas

Most of the dishes are washed now and the mess of torn wrapping paper, while not completely cleaned away, has at least been gathered from the ocean on the floor into plastic bags or piles around the living room. The tree is still up but the lights will stay off now--soon to be packed into an old cardboard box and left in the corner of my spare room. My second Chinese Christmas has come and gone.

All in all--I'm really proud of the holiday that we worked together to share and make special. It was a really lovely day. Katera and I invited some of our good American friends to spend the night with us, so on Christmas Eve, Julie and Katie and David came up (Julie is in her 2nd year here too and Katie and David are married). David made wassail, Katera provided brownies (which are a delicacy over here), Julie brought fudge (a delicacy anywhere) and we all drank warm drinks and watched Fred Claus and Merry Christmas Charlie Brown in our pj's. A little after midnight we paused for a candlelit service to think about Christmas, sing the more meaningful carols and share the Supper. It was all filled with joy and peace.

On Christmas morning, I was up early to make cinnamon rolls and latkes while Julie and Katera scrambled eggs in her kitchen. We drank leftover wassail or coffee and had a hearty breakfast and opened presents together (each person brought one generic wrapped present--all gifts that someone would want) and even had stockings complete with oranges in the toes! After hanging out for a while, everyone dispersed to their own apartments for naps or more Christmas fun.

This being China, there were of course a few potential calamities to be dealt with. Our water was turned off on campus the two days before Christmas--so washing our few pots and pans for reuse was a bit difficult, and it was annoying to ask guests to manually flush the toliets using a bucket of water! I killed the yeast in my cinnamon rolls by using hot water instead of warm water to mix the dough (all of you in America need to pause right now with a prayer of thanks for Pilsbury and canned cinnamon rolls) and my electric eye kept turning off while I was frying my latkes so the oil wouldn't stay hot enough to quickly cook them.

Despite such trials, it was a beautiful day. The dishes were washed with my bottled water jug, the toliet stayed flushed, the cinnamon rolls were just a little heavy and chewy instead of light and fluffy but still just as sweet, and the latkes managed to not get tooo soggy and tasted pretty good. We had fun opening presents and I think we were all able to savour our moments together instead of spending too much time thinking of where we weren't for the day.

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As I've been tidying up from a long week of Christmas parties, I keep looking at the nativity scene I painted really quickly. I told the story 8 times during the past week--and my thoughts keep lingering on Matthew's account...the wise men, specifically. Two thousand years ago, scholars from the east began a journey to find....well, something. From the east. Two thousand years ago, these men were searching for wisdom or purpose or some type of key to life and were not able to find fulfillment in any of their own culture's answers. In the east. So they gave up looking among their society and turned upward to the stars. Among those stars, they found a light to lead them to a strange land and to a newborn type of king for a newborn type of kingdom.

So here, in my Christmas in this land in the Far East, I think about that star, and those men--so empty and hungry in their own land that they would risk everything to travel long miles following a star. I think about how the answer the star brought those men to changed the world forever. And now, two thousand years later, our hope is that the wise people in the lands in the east don't have to travel far from home to find the answer of that star. Our hope is that they will find stars right here, at ground level, in the midst of life here. It is a heady thing to claim to be a star, but it is what is required of each of us. As we think about that Christmas star leading people to an answer, we must never forget that we too are called to shine like stars in the universe as we hold out....well, you know the rest....whether to those in lands to the east or lands to the west. Merry Christmas.