Christmas Time
A poem and commentary to slow down and to look within
The following I wrote nearly 40 years ago around this time when my country began ramping up for Christmas, which nowadays happens before Thanksgiving. As an adult, Christmas has been low-key, even with children. Sure, there are the gifts, but in moderation. Without children, it is celebrating family, but more importantly, it is a time of celebrating finding the light within—a time for contemplation.
When I returned from my time with the Peace Corps in Cameroon and my subsequent travels to the Himalayas in Nepal, I arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area before Christmas to see family after three years abroad. I went to the large, opulent Stanford Shopping Center and was stunned by the insanity of people rushing around buying, buying, buying. This is not the American Dream, I thought. It is an American Nightmare.
Years later, when my oldest son, in his early twenties, asked me to go with him to a mall the day after Thanksgiving on what is called Black Friday, the biggest day of consuming, my first response was no. Then, I decided to make it a practice of finding the neutral place and quelling my aversion to it all. I sat in a foyer and watched the chaos of people, running, shoving, frantically going from store to store before their items of choice were sold out. It was not an easy…
