Imagining Christmas

Hello. My name is Jon and I’m a Christmas Nazi.

I grew up convinced that Christmas had to be celebrated precisely the same way every year. A few of the rules: The tree goes up 2 weeks before Christmas, no sooner, no later. Under no circumstance substitute an artificial tree. Buy big expensive gifts that can be opened only on Christmas morning, before breakfast, while Christmas records play in the background. Family only welcome. Presents are never opened the night before.  Not even a peek is allowed. Just one shake.

The least misstep, and the magic wouldn’t happen—THE magic. I can’t even tell you precisely what the magic is, even though I’ve been chasing it down with a checkbook for as long as I can remember.

Sometimes I wonder if the magic is just an illusion, a leftover childhood fantasy. Even today, regardless of my attempts to arrange the pieces of Christmas just right, the holiday comes and goes with a little bit of a let down, a touch of melancholy. Like once again, something promised didn’t show up under the tree.

I’ve been dreading this Christmas, not even wanting to go through the motions, knowing that we didn’t have the money to replicate past extravagances.

But then I came across a quote. Sometimes the right words, at the right time, can change your life. I forget who said it. But it went, “In life, you can either live out of your imagination, or you can live out of your history.”

It hit me right between the eyes. That’s what I’ve been doing with much of my life, including Christmas. I have been living out of my history, doing the things that had worked once upon a time, avoiding the things that didn’t work and stubbornly refusing to imagine a new story. I didn’t want to admit that MY Christmas story died many years ago. Since then I’ve been pushing around the pieces, trying to resuscitate the magic of childhood.

I can remember like yesterday when Christmas was fresh and alive and magical. There was Santa Clause in the manger the Baby Jesus coming down the chimney and reindeer named after the Apostles, all mixed up together, but it didn’t matter.  Back then my imagination was green, supple, pliable. Imagining a new life was easy.

In fact, before I was burdened with years and years of history to lug around, I could imagine 3 or 4 new lives before breakfast.

I’ve often used this, but one of my favorite quotes about childhood was written by Graham Greene. He says, “There is always one moment in a child’s life when the door opens and lets the future in.”

I remember plainly that happening to me when I was about four or five. My father and I are out driving. As always, when he approached the railroad tracks near our home, he comes to a complete stop, even though no train is in sight.

This time I ask him, Daddy why do you stop?”

He nods up at a big white sign with black writing. “Cause it tells you to.”

I didn’t hear anybody tell my daddy to do anything. “Who told you? What’d he say?

He points. “See, it says ‘Mississippi Law Stop.’”

Those were the first three words I learned to read. And they held magic. Not because they told my father what to. But because he did it. Nobody told my dad what to do. I mean nobody.

But these strange markings called words held a power over my father. I was impressed. It had to be God speaking through those words.

That’s when I illogically, insanely and unscientifically fell in love with language. From then on, when we approached a Stop sign or Yield sign, I begged to get out of the car and for Daddy to hold me up to touch the signs, to let me run my fingers over the raised lettering. In that moment, the door opened and let the future in.

Soon I would forget.

The door didn’t shut all a once.  It began in the first grade. Education is about being taught to see things like others have seen them for generations before. About learning the cold, dead facts of the world. Competence, proficiency and performance. Meeting others expectations. Imagination and creativity are not appreciated.

I hung on a few years trying to live out of my imagination, trying to believe in magic. But day-by-day the world became less enchanted. Music was no longer something you spontaneously sang when you were happy. No, it became a dead animal that could be dissected into bars and notes and key signatures.

A flower could be analyzed by its components, without once taking into account its beauty, its fragrance, the way it made you feel loved by God. Everything could be pulled apart, sorted and compartmentalized, pinned down like butterflies in a glass display case.

It was in the 5^th grade, when the final break with my imagined life occurred. It was close to Easter and Mrs. Ainsworth told us we were going to have an art contest. I was excited. I loved to draw. To a kid, a blank page, like the future, is an invitation to create something totally your own.

I remember exactly what I drew. I put three crosses on a purple hill. Purple was a sad color and I knew God was sad watching his only boy die. So of course the ground had to be purple.

Mrs. Ainsworth chose my picture to use as a bad example of art. She said she had never seen purple grass. She told us real art, art that counted, was about color schemes, geometric shapes and proportion.

I learned once and for all, enthusiasm, originality and joy did not count for much in life. Keeping your head down and following the rules did.

Your masters didn’t care what you loved, only how well you mimicked their thinking. That’s when the door shut. It took another forty years to pry that door open again, reclaim the magic and become a writer.

It’s taken a lot of work, spiritual and emotional, to recover what little bit of boldness I now possess to imagine a new future. To transcend my history and see new options.

One way I’ve done it is to give myself DO-OVERS. Kids get to do DO-OVERS all the time, when they shout, “That doesn’t count. Let me do it again.”

I’ve done do-overs with my parents. A few years ago, I decided to have a new childhood with them. We agreed to stop the hurtful pattern of behavior and we imagined a new relationship together.

I went back to an old bully in the 7^th grade who made my life hell. We met over coffee and I told him what school had been like for me. He listened, apologized. We’re now friends.

I recently got a chance to do a do-over that I hadn’t planned. I got a call from a schoolteacher. He knew about the work I was doing with story and wondered if there was there anything that could apply to kids.

He was afraid that his students were at an age where they were learning competences like reading and writing, but he wanted make sure they didn’t lose their own internal voices—their creativity and imagination.

I could almost hear their doors creaking shut. “What grades are we talking about?” I asked.

Of course I knew what he was going to say. “Fifth grade.”

Talk about returning to the scene of the crime! I was going to get to do the fifth grade over, without Mrs. Ainsworth.

When I showed up I had 70 children looking up at me. I could see in their eyes that the magic was still there, their willingness to believe the unbelievable. I asked myself, if I were one of them, what would I have loved Mrs. Ainsworth to have told me in the fifth grade? I had the overwhelming urge to shout, “Run for your lives! Don’t believe what grown ups tell you! The magic is REAL! If you lose it you’ll never get it back.”

Instead I slowly looked around the room, taking in the attentive, respectful group.

I noticed they were all wearing their Catholic school uniform. Blue slacks and dresses, white shirts. Then it hit me how to begin.

I asked, “How many of you played dress-up when you were a kid?” This quiet, well-behaved group of kids who were trained to raise their hands to speak, spontaneously erupted in laughter and animated chatter. Everybody was telling their story at once.

When I was able to get their attention, I asked, “Now, how many of you had fun getting dressed this morning?”

The energy died. No one moved. The question had returned them to the world of competence, of right and wrong, of denying your uniqueness so you don’t stand out. A world in which imagination only gets you in trouble.

I told them that this was like writing.  Writing has a lot of rules that you have to master or you won’t get very far. Punctuation, spelling, neatness, grammar. I told them it was like wearing a uniform to school. Sometimes you got to do it.

But I told them OUR story writing was going to be different. “When you write your stories, I want it to feel like playing dress-up.

There are no rules. Spelling doesn’t count. Neither does grammar nor neatness. You can write at your desk, on the floor or standing on your head. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. You get to try things on and decide if they fit you or not. Just listen to what makes your heart jump. That is your voice trying to speak. Write that. THAT”S what the best writers do.”

One of the kids is known by his teachers as shy, not good at sports, a boy who always sits in the back of the room. Dale is a loner. His teachers worry about him socially as well as academically. They can’t get to him. They are afraid they are going to lose him.

Two weeks ago Dale meekly slipped a two-page story to me when nobody was looking. When I read his work that evening, I was dumb-founded. It was brilliant. It sang with life and energy and spontaneity and imagination. I couldn’t believe this work came from the same boy. He told a better story than most of the adults I teach.

I wanted Dale to read his story to the class. The teachers were afraid he would choke. Or that the other kids wouldn’t respond favorably and he would end up even more isolated. It was a gamble. But there was something about this boy. In my heart, I knew what this boy was up to. He was making his move. He was close to being overwhelmed by his history. The door to an imagined future was closing. In the only way he could, he was telling me, “My time has come.”

The day arrived when Dale, this shy wallflower of a boy, stood alone before his classmates. The notebook pages shook in his hand. I could tell he had stopped breathing. Dale began to mumble his story.

I nearly panicked. The teachers’ fears were going to be realized. I went up to DALE and whispered in his ear, “Dale, this is a wonderful story. And you know what? It’s yours and nobody else’s. I want you to read it like you love it.”

He looked down at his story, as if recognizing it for the first time. He smiled. He began again. When he spoke, it was with authority. I was transfixed. This boy was speaking HIS words, telling HIS story, and he was, in that moment living a life that was uniquely his, one that no one had lived before. Dale was imagining a future better than anyone had predicted for him. And he was doing it right before our eyes.  We all sat mesmerized.

As he stood there reading, I’m sure everyone was thinking the same thing I was. “Oh, THIS is who Dale is. I never knew.”

In that moment he was larger than all the labels that the world had put on him. He was bigger than the reasonable conclusions of all the experts. Dale was throwing off his history. And the future was saying “Yes” to the man he was becoming.

When he was finished, the kids gave him a wild round of applause and flocked around him like a football hero, congratulating him, patting him on the back, peppering him with questions about the man-eating dinosaur he had created and about the two boy hunters who went tracking it.  They wanted to know more of this new person who had magically appeared in their midst. And now Dale has found an abundant supply of himself to give. I looked over at the teacher who was so worried about Dale. She had tears in her eyes.

I’ve decided Graham Greene was wrong. The opportunity doesn’t come around just once. It’s there every day of the year. I think God is always opening the doors and showing us a new life, never before imagined, but children are the only ones who will see it.

Maybe that’s why, every time the disciples had trouble believing the far-out things Jesus was asking them to imagine, he pointed out a little child.

“Be like this child. Believe like this child. Anticipate with hope like this child. Be like this child and be reborn! If you keep putting your history, your past experiences, out in front of you, you will never see!”

Thanks to Dale. I have imagined a new story for Christmas. It is no longer the extravaganza of the year. For me this is the season when God sent his son to release us from our history. To show us a door. A new way of imagining the world, so that we may have life, and have it more abundantly.