White Christmas

It was a white Christmas for much of the US this year, including us. Susan’s first white Christmas; she keeps reminding us! The snow started on Christmas Eve morning and just kept on coming all throughout the day and night. I was excited to see a really white Christmas after all of these years, but not Susan. Apparently she would be perfectly content to have gone her entire life without ever seeing a white Christmas. I suppose we can attribute some of her confusion and grumpiness to the weather.

The back of our house is lined with large windows that peep southward onto an open back porch and beyond. So, from nearly every room in the house there is an inescapable view of our snow covered back yard. Every time Susan has emerged from her bedroom these past three days, she has inevitably looked with surprise (the kind of surprise one expresses upon seeing something for the very first time!) at the snow-covered back yard. “Karen! What is that?” she always asks as if we didn’t have this same conversation thirty minutes ago. “Is that ice that is coming down?” she continues. “Why is it all white outside?” “Snow, Mom.” I repeatedly have replied. “I have never seen this before!” she shutters and shivers at the cold. And she is right; her life has been spent in sunny Florida, southern California and the warm Philippine Islands. This really is her first cold white Christmas!

It is obvious to anyone who has seen Susan since the winter solstice that she does not like the cold! She has sat sipping hot coffee with a grumpy face while complaining about the weather and the dead plants until I have wanted to hide! I try cheer; “Susan, isn’t it beautiful! We are going to have a white Christmas! How exciting!” “We don’t need it, Karen!” she grumbles. “I think God knows best what we need.” I say, more as a reminder to myself then to her. Trying not to let her attitude wear off on me, I half look her way.

There, in my kitchen, sits my strong willed mother-in-law this holiday season. Never in the years past would she have visited us- let alone on the holidays. If, years past, I could have seen into the future, I am certain that I would have thought that the crystal ball was broken. And admittedly, I know for certain that I would have not wanted this. But really, we rarely get what we want (or think we want), it seems to me. Perhaps we get what we need. Still, here we are- her and I- on this cold snowy day in my Oklahoma kitchen and somewhere inside of me, I feel a bit of gratitude for this Christmas gift, this life of ours, as strange as it is.




"Consider it a sheer gift, friends, when tests and challenges come at you from all sides. You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors. So don't try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way." James 1:2-4 (The Message)