I remember when we were both children. My thumb fit nicely in the space between your ceramic fingers reaching and your ceramic legs kicking. You were the same shape every year when we lifted you from the crackling tissue paper. Unchanging and immovable God.
Now I am an adult, taking these things in slowly. Poinsettias towering over the altar, and the paper doors of advent calendars - some days never able to fit neatly back in, hinges over-creased from years of expectant opening, the slow turning of surprise into reminder, The Christmas Story now mostly a collection of words that I know by heart forced together only at this time of year: hark, manger, census.
Yesterday I watched a small boy - one of those little boys with the skinny arms and the fly-away hair - he picked up his dad's coffee cup as soon as he was left alone at the table for a moment at Starbucks. With two hands, he lifted the cup to his eye, trying to see inside through the sipping hole. Debating whether or not to have a rebellious gulp.
Treasure. Ponder. The unique taste of cookies overexposed to other cookies under a tent of saran wrap on creased paper plates. Remember to tip the unlit candle into the lit candle. Peace, be still. Good news. Old news. Christ was born for this. My fingers reach and my feet kick when I wake from bad dreams, return from places worse than the world already is. May Christmas cut through the darkness, said the words printed in the liturgy. I picture a slicing joy, creating ragged edges. I picture you, still and ceramic. I watch. I wait.
