JOY ALONG THE WAY: CHRISTMAS DAY IN THE MORNING

Merry Christmas! I hope your day has started with good fragrances and good food, good health, good company and good cheer.

For fragrance and good food I'd have cedar, oranges, fresh brewed coffee, cinnamon rolls baking, or maybe a stollen. Country ham frying or sage-laced pork sausage would enhance the epicurean anticipation.

I would that you have some loved ones around, good friends, old and new, touching base with you some time today, exclaiming, "Christmas Gift," "Good Cheer," "Happy Holidays," "Love you!"

Is there anyone cranky on Christmas Day in the morning? Most Scrooges have, during the prelude to Christmas, been worn down, defeated, too weak to even enunciate, "Bah, humbug." Even nations at war sometime declare a brief time-out to celebrate the idea of a world at peace.

Saturated with stories and plays, pageants and music, we are comforted by the Christ Child's coming and the sweet knowledge that what He came to do was done.

I wish for you a place to be warm when the cold winds blow and the capacity to be thankful for those who might supply the warmth.

I hope that you have received some presents, or a present, and that you have given some, or one, in order to feel the lift and satisfaction of giving. Perhaps your gift can be a snow-cleaned sidewalk, washing the outside of a dirty window -- great gifts in my opinion. They help re-fill the great reservoir of goodwill we must all dip into some time along the way.

I hope you have enjoyed the merchants' decorations. Of course, they have a motive, but the decorations are beautiful and free for us to stand and enjoy, to touch, to listen to if there is sound. So much of the Christmas anticipation is free -- walking amongst the trees for sale, breathing deeply of the pine and cedar, listening to the piped music on the streets and in the stores. All church doors are open to enter and witness the cantatas and the children's programs.

I wish for you good memories of Christmases past, the one when you got your first sled, bicycle, doll or bottle of perfume, the one when you first took some part in a school or church play. Were you Joseph, Mary, a Wise Man, or one of the shepherds?

I was once an angel dressed in layers of gauze, an angel with a broken wing. Coming out of a makeshift dressing room, I snagged by wire-framed, tinsel-bordered wing on a nail. The wing hung loosely at my side until my young classmate came to stand beside me and hold up the wing as we sang, "Hark the Herald Angels Sing." We got lots of applause which was for the little one holding up the wing. Angel with a broken wing -- nice title. I'll write about it some day in appreciation of all people who help hold up wings.

I wish you time to sit, rest and re-read your Christmas cards -- the messages and study the pictures. Here is one of a town square. The bakery, the tailor, Ye Olde Shoppe, The Red Boot are all so close together, with criss-crossed snowy paths to them all, as if everyone has gone everywhere to greet his neighbors. Smoke ascends from chimneys, lights glow in windows. What a wonderful world, the world of Christmas cards.

Though it comes gradually, I would wish you the great gift of being able to read. Then, if your world has dwindled to one room, you can still ride the great white whale, climb the Matterhorn, sail where the trade winds blow and on this particular day walk down an old, old path from the Inn to the Stable and see what has come to pass -- THE GREATEST GIFT OF ALL.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southest Missourian.