Personally, I think the big miracle involved here is that this baby was born, and in spite of the fact that he was surrounded by farm animals, a kid playing a drum solo, and three guys giving him frankensense when all he really wanted was a comfortable diaper that wasn't filled with hay, he didn't cry. I've come to appreciate this miracle more and more since I've been hanging out in the airport.
Yes, Christmas is a time when we all like to sit back and reflect on things like goodwill towards men because when your flight's been delayed three hours and the airport TV news station is showing a report on the history of the Christmas Turkey for the fifth time, (mostly because they're not allowed to report on plane crashes, which probably involves the flight you're waiting for) there's not much else to do. Yes, I know that was a horrible run-on sentence, but I think I've earned it, thank you very much.
Since infants can't really appreciate goodwill towards men, they spend their time crying. And I guess I should cut them some slack, since there is a lot at airports which can scare young infants - big scary planes making big scary noises, stewardesses wearing too much blush, and the really frightening random air molecules.
But after many delays, including one due to the fact that we didn't have enough gas (and I've watched enough Happy Days episodes to suspect this is a trick the pilot pulled so he could make out with the co-pilot), I made it back home in one piece and was soon in the exciting town of Acton "Action!" Massachusetts, a town where our idea of exciting nightlife is a Dunkin' Donuts that's open 24 hours.
Actually, Acton is very cute in a Norman Rockwell sort of way. By which I mean to say that it's dead. No, wait, that's not quite true. We have this nice Christmas tradition in which we all go up to the town hall and sing Christmas carols. We're led by this very nice old man. (And when I say "nice" here, I mean it the same way as "Grandpa's such a nice old man, we're going to put him in a home.") Usually, he'll read all the words to each song before we actually sing them, just in case we're incapable of reading them ourselves off the songsheet. So we all stand out there in 20-below windchill, wondering what happened to all the feeling in our face, and listening to him say, "Okay, this song starts off with 'Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer' and then the second line is 'Had a very shiny nose'. And I don't want any of you kids singing 'Like a light bulb' here, or I'm going to put you over my knee."
Incidentally, is this pretty much a national thing... the auxiliary lyrics to Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer? Send mail to todd@kerp.net and let me know. But I digress...
Anyway, one year people got tired of waiting for him to finish all the words and just started singing. Well, as you can imagine, this was a huge SCANDAL! Imagine, people singing before he was finished reading the songs to us! I'm sure you can see the potential for disaster.
Actually, this scandal kept our home town quite happy because the last scandal we had involved a sewage treatment plant, and people were dying for gossip that didn't involve the words "solid waste." So it was either talk about this or our library's new hours.
Yes, due to the lack of funding, the town library had to decrease their hours significantly. Last I checked, it was open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2:00 - 2:15. This actually fit their budget quite well, seeing as how the circulation desk shuts down half an hour before the library closes, so nobody could actually check out any material and therefore the library never needed to buy any books. They can spend their money training the librarians to be more rude with people who use the copy machine. Our town librarians are generally under the impression that their copy machine would be much easier to maintain if people stopped making copies with it. They yelled at me once for touching the paper tray. They said their service contract is invalid if anybody besides the librarians touch the paper tray. This is apparently the "surly librarian" package sponsored by Xerox.
But anyway, that's pretty much Christmas in my home town. A cold place filled with surly librarians and senile old men. But my family is there, which makes the whole experience worth it. Especially my dog, who is always so happy to see me. Of course, she's just as thrilled when the UPS guy comes to visit, so maybe I shouldn't get too attached.