christmas past

this is the christmas season, which i love...but i hate the commercialism. i worked for in retail for 13 years. holiday merchandise was put out beginning in september and by christmas, we were focused on lawn furniture, lawn mowers and exercise equipment.  christmas was about profit, which isn't shameful until you flavor it heavily with greed. you import everything from china, you convince the population (through a saturated media blitz) that they cannot possibly live comfortably without your merchandise and then you turn the most holy of holidays into a well choreographed sales campaign.

about ten years ago i was living in a small town in new mexico, working as a very successful marketing manager for that retail organization i mentioned. it was christmas eve and i was exhausted. i had worked long hours, dealt with the rudeness that holiday shopping seems to inspire and it depressed me. i sat in my tiny apartment, staring at my sparsely decorated pine tree...feeling empty. around midnight, i decided to take a walk around my neighborhood. i couldn't sleep and i thought the exercise would help.  back then, i could manuever comfortably in the dark :)

it was a crisp new mexican night...a light snow fell silently as i passed by little houses decorated with luminarias and strings of colored lights. i came upon the small catholic church, which was buzzing with activity...it was midnight mass. i stood in the shadows of a huge cottonwood tree and watched the people filing into church. i think i started to cry. part of me wanted to attend that midnight mass but i talked myself out of it. i wasn't dressed for church. it was a spanish church and i was anglo. i didn't have any money on me for the collection plate. so i walked home. but i thought about the birth of jesus, about mary and joseph...about how i had lost my faith for so long...i thought such serious thoughts that night as i walked home. but for the first time in years, sitting alone with a cup of chocolate and the smell of pine...i was at peace.