christmas

Another Christmas PoemBlood Christmas, here again.Let us raise a loving cup:Peace on earth, goodwill to men,And make them do the washing-up.

I get that Christmas is generally schmaltzy. I understand that it is used as a cynical cash grab. I know how far it is from what Jesus would have wanted. Nevertheless, I like that people put forth some effort to see one another during this season, that some people shake out of their commonplace anthood and toward sainthood.

Christmas and the others can end up making you sad, because you know you should be happy.

Santa is like a queen bee. All the elves are his drones, who exist to feed him royal jelly, which I guess would be milk and cookies. If an elf escapes and eats royal cookies, it will turn into another Santa. That__ what all those mall Santas are. They__e trying to start their own festive colonies.

Christmas is not something that sprang from the musings of some person who creatively devised caricatures of elves, spiraling candy canes, visions of a magical city whose foundation was nestled in the far reaches of the North Pole, or embellishments of a kindly bishop spun by myth into a bearded old man in a red suit.

So now we pause. Still. Ponder. Hush. Wait. Each day of Advent, He gives you the gift of time, so you have time to be still and wait. Wait for the coming of the God in the manger who makes Himself bread for us near starved. For the Savior in swaddlings who makes Himself the robe of righteousness for us worn out. For Jesus, who makes precisely what none of us can but all of us want: Christmas.

I can't ignore his one-sided almost smile or his methylene blue eyes. I can't ignore his pretty shoulders or his arms. I can't ignore his big hands, his shoulder-blade-spanning hands, the way the tendons in them lock to every knuckle and speculate on things like capability and dexterity and, of course, the scar over those knuckles on his left hand that I've noticed before, and its reminder that he has a life and has been hurt in it.

They shared an image of the American Christmas--riches, reconciliations, tears, snow, success, sentiment, furs and firs, the shop windows shining like Heaven and everything good for sale.

Christmas was an ingenious plan designed by God to lay siege to the hearts of all men by submitting Himself to the greed of all men.

Christmas Eve, I give him packages which I open for him, since the bows and paper represent more labor than he could manage: music videos by the Nashville singers he thinks particularly sexy, fleece-lined slippers decorated with images of bacon and eggs, and a book about breeds of dogs. He says he wishes he had something for me to open, but I don__ want anything except to have him here. There__ nothing more he could give me than his life, right now, his being with me.

Mary knew God loved her. From the moment Gabriel appeared to her, Mary has a distinct sense that God__ presence was with her and His hand upon her. She didn__ understand everything that was happening, but she was certain that God would be with her through it all.

Christmas is everything that God would do, and nothing that we would imagine Him doing.

How old did someone have to be before they could be put to use to make tea?

We cannot humanize the fact that the story was penned to have the eternal God, Who Himself knows no beginning nor is in need of one, choose to experience a beginning. That is genius in and of itself.

Enjoying your Christmas in the land of the dead? Fun and different, right?

He disowned me,_ I murmured. __icked me out and told me to come back when I changed my choice.___e seriously used those words? That it was a choice?__ nodded. __ou can__ change it. Your sexuality is like your DNA. You can__ cut off your finger so it__ no longer there, because it is you. You__e born with it__ou just discover it when you mature.

It's just sex, Blake. Isn't that what you said to me the last time? No emotions. Just sex.___'ll only end up hurting you,_ I say to the wall. __orse than I did before.__e moves from the back of the sofa and comes to stand directly in front of me. His dick is mere inches from my mouth. I have to swallow several times to keep from using my tongue on it. I close my eyes.__ can't, Seth. If I take you now I'll be rough and I'll end up hurting you in other ways.___eing rough wasn't a concern of yours before.___'m not the same person I was before.

It was a pretty sight, and a seasonable one, that met their eyes when they flung the door open. In the fore-court, lit by the dim rays of a horn lantern, some eight or ten little field-mice stood in a semicircle, red worsted comforters round their throats, their fore-paws thrust deep into their pockets, their feet jigging for warmth. With bright beady eyes they glanced shyly at each other, sniggering a little, sniffing and applying coat-sleeves a good deal. As the door opened, one of the elder ones that carried the lantern was just saying, "Now then, one, two, three!" and forthwith their shrill little voices uprose on the air, singing one of the old-time carols that their forefathers composed in fields that were fallow and held by frost, or when snow-bound in chimney corners, and handed down to be sung in the miry street to lamp-lit windows at Yule-time.