Christmas Crackers

“Merry Christmas,” my cheery sister-in-law greeted me over the phone from their long-awaited vacation in Hawaii.

“Yeah, right,” I groaned.

As fun goes, this Christmas ranks right up there with the one when I was eight. That was the year I emptied my stocking with its hoard of oranges, candy, new Crayola crayons, etc. onto the floor at my grandparents' house in Kokomo, Indiana and got an instant stomach ache — before I ate a thing! I spent the day in the high four-poster in the bedroom listening to the laughter from the living room where the extended family was having their annual exchange of goofy gifts. That might have been the year that someone gave a “do-it-yourself breakfast” — a cob of corn in a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box — or a pre-splattered tie you wouldn’t have to worry about spilling on at dinner. I remember lying in bed, glimpsing my great aunt through the living-room door as she modeled a wide-brimmed straw hat decorated with large yellow sunflowers. I felt left out and very sorry for myself. A couple soda crackers make a lousy Christmas dinner. No doubt the surgeon had fond thoughts of little LeAnne as he was called out Christmas evening to do an emergency appendectomy.

Soda crackers still make a lousy Christmas dinner. This year fourteen-month-old Bella came down with stomach flu a few days before Christmas. The vomiting only lasted about twelve hours but left her lethargic and without appetite for days afterward. Her mommy, Katie, was next. On Christmas Eve son-in-law Adam started vomiting although by evening he managed to sit with us while we sang carols and read Luke chapter two as we have every year since Katie’s first Christmas.

At two A.M. Christmas morning Erika started vomiting. At five I joined her. The most inconvenient moment was when Erika occupied the bathroom while my contracting stomach muscles pushed food in various stages of digestion in both directions. Steve ate Christmas dinner so he had a lot more to come up. By the time Katie and family left for her in-laws' the three of us who were left crawled into separate corners to sleep it off.

I am older now and more philosophical than at eight. I lay in bed and thanked God that I was sick that day instead of two days later when we were scheduled to fly to Indiana. (Vomiting and diarrhea are somewhat inconvenient on a plane, and my fellow passengers would probably not be sympathetic with my commitment to attend the family reunion.) I prayed off and on for a friend in the last stages of leukemia. While my nausea would soon pass, Chris would never again on this earth feel strong and energetic. (He has since received his new, healthy, heavenly body.) I could also be grateful for a mother-in-law with lots of experience and a daughter who graduated from Cordon Bleu Culinary School who took over from my sketchy dinner preparations.

Of course, Christmas is not about turkey dinners or brightly wrapped packages. It’s about God taking on flesh, living with our weakness and dying in our sin so that we might be freed from both. My life should celebrate the incarnation three-hundred-and-sixty-five days a year, not merely on December the twenty-fifth. Nevertheless, next year I would like to eat my turkey fresh and leave the soda crackers to crumble in turkey soup.