A VERY SPECIAL STATE OF MIND!

By Edwin Cooney

Although I’ve always loved Christmas whatever my fortune may be, I know there are millions of people who’d just as soon pass on it. In that sense, Christmas is like every other day, to “use as you choose!”

In Puritan New England in the 1600’s, Christmas was banned. Celebrants of Christmas were fined as much as five shillings should they be discovered “Christmas-ing!” (my word of course!).  Puritans found no scriptural justification for Christmas. Furthermore, Christmas, as too often practiced by Anglicans and Catholics, was an exceedingly rowdy holiday with sports, drink, rudeness and even lewdness.

Tomorrow will be my 73rd Christmas.  Some Christmases, due to the thoughtfulness and generosity of many (as well as my willingness to suspend believability in exchange for self-gratifying imagination) have been wonderful. Other Christmases have been made uncomfortable by illness, saddened by separation and divorce, empty due to loneliness. Nevertheless, I’ve never felt a sense of indifference about Christmas.

If I describe something as magical, what does that mean to you? Of course, there is magic in Halloween ghosts, goblins and witches, but I’m in capable of handling ghoulish magic. To me, what’s magical is inevitably wonderful and I can tell you when that began for me.

I had just turned eight years old after Thanksgiving of 1953. My dormitory room was on the second floor of the south end of Hamilton Hall at the New York State School for the Blind in Batavia. We’d be in bed by 7:30 and as the 8 o’clock hour began I’d hear Christmas carols coming from an organ in the room just below mine. It was wonderful to hear and it put me in a happy mood. “Christmas must be just around the corner,” I told myself. My favorite carol turned out to be “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” I knew the words and I imagined myself as a shepherd boy in the fields with the sheep as an especially bright star hovered overhead and an angel appeared with “good tidings of great joy.” Baby Jesus was newly born and I was invited to visit the baby. I loved long hikes back then, so a hike that ended with a Christmas party was very exciting. I anticipated that we shepherd boys would visit the baby and the party would begin. Of course, there would be cake and ice cream, cookies, doughnuts, candy, oranges, tangerines, juice, milk, hot chocolate and lots of presents given by Santa Claus to both baby Jesus and we shepherd boys. How could it not be that way? Even later, as I became familiar with world geography,  although I always knew better, I loved imagining where Santa was on Christmas Eve. Of course, the North Pole was somewhere near Alaska and, although I could never decide for myself how Santa managed to make his world tour, land on all those roofs and eat all the cookies and milk children everywhere left out for him, it was still fun imagining it all.

Ultimately, Christmas is a state of mind. Even more, Christmas is personal. Nothing you believe about it has anything to do with right or wrong. Historians and theologians will remind you and me that Jesus was probably born sometime in April rather than during the winter solstice, but so what? As for the over-commercialization of Christmas, Christmas always has been and always will be the permission we extend to ourselves to celebrate one another, to give and receive.

The older I get, the less I feel the need to receive presents, although surprises and gifts will always be pleasant experiences. The ultimate power of Christmas is beyond our individual capacity for imagining. The power of Christmas is in our willingness to do what we can to make one another feel worthwhile.

Christmas, as addressed here, is a Christian holiday, but Christians have no monopoly on either thoughtfulness or generosity. Generosity is both secular and religious. Acknowledgment of the needs and hopes of other people is, in the final analysis, what the “Christmas spirit” is all about.

Christmas is indeed a very, very special state of mind! All glory be to its name!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY