I have a sister and also it's Christmas.

Sandra.  Her name means "defender of men" and is a derivative of the Greek "Alexandra."  After meeting her for the first time again, since she was two and I six, yesterday, my mind is brimming with facts and more than I can hold.  I've been telling all my loved ones as much of it as I can in the snippets of our lives we manage to intersect and yet I come home to so much of it left untold, and, like an affectionate kitty, it hops in my lap the moment I sit down and demands my attention.  The truth is, Sandra and I started a conversation that I am desperate to not lose and yet my own life seems a little too messy to house our new connection.  


It's the beginning of November and I want to immerse myself in the spiritual wonderland we Protestants call Christmastime. I am listening to Christmas music as I write and am determined to let at least a part of me remain aware of the simple pleasures these two months afford me.  Forgetting to schedule so much, as everyone is "so busy with the Holidays," they tend to want to postpone all things obligatory.  Smelling and cooking and giving and glueing and cutting and creating for the first time in months.  While many seem to get in high gear around Christmas, I tend to take that as my cue to lay low and look at lights and my children more closely.  I love giving and getting presents with the best of them, but my husband's choice to go back to school and my former one to drop out before obtaining my degree have left us with about two dollars.  


I do not remember any Christmases with Sandra.  In fact, we share one of the few memories I do have with her.  I was absolutely stunned when she told me on the phone yesterday that she remembers a dark-haired girl comforting her in a dark bedroom, seeming to be hiding her.  As I remember her face, whatever my 8-year old mind could record, it gets instantly replaced by my own 2-year old's face, Berea.  She is suddenly mine, more than ever, in my memory.  Strangely, I had always thought she was 4, but I realize now, that it was because I related to her as though she were very near me in age.  Not having had a child to see the development, I just felt she was a younger version of me.  So, back to our shared memory.  She remembers a dark-haired girl who was trying to comfort her in the dark.  I am elated at the fact that she remembers what I intended at the time.  So, here's what was really happening:  She had come to spend the weekend with my dad and my grandmother and when her mom came to pick her up, my dad lied and said she wasn't there.  Her mom got the police involved and my dad had told me to take her to the back bedroom and keep her with me there.  Curiosity got the best of me, and I snuck down the hall with her and peered around the wall and of course, the police saw her and got her.  I forever felt guilty that I had "let them find her."  As if they wouldn't have gone looking, anyway. I am just thankful that, somehow, God preserved that memory of her with me and we were allies in it.  That is all I hope to be to her now.


"Let's hope its a good one, without any fear...So this is Christmas...and what have we done?  The near and the dear ones, the old and the young..."  It's the only time of year where we honestly hope that every single person we know can be happy.  To have a loved one be sad on Christmas, although a common plight, I'm sure, seems to be an utmost failure of our own.  It just seems the one time of life where we aren't happy until everyone is.  And probably how we're supposed to be living life all year, but I thank God for coming at a specific time and making a cause for celebration, remembrance, and contemplation.   There will be a time and place where the Government will rest on His shoulders and we will make it our business at all times to make others as happy as ourselves.  For now, I am thankful that Heaven came to earth, for at least a night...is there another account of myriads of angels rejoicing in the sight of men?  Other than Revelation, where they sing Holy, Holy, Holy day and night...But here, on the night He was born, they can't help but invite men.  Humble shepherds.  It is so easy to make them sinless in our minds, as well as Mary and Joseph, and the Wise Men.  But we know this couldn't be true and they are simply in the right place, at the right time, when God wants to be happy about something, and He can't help but involve his delicate creation...and they do the only appropriate thing:  come and see...worship...stay awhile...I wonder if they knew when to leave?  I wonder if they wanted to see Jesus when Mary had just finished nursing Him to sleep.  "Can we see the baby??!" as my sweet friends said to me right at Anderson's bedtime, 5 days after we were home.  I wished they had offered to clean my house and I wonder if Mary was relieved of some of that compulsion by the mere fact that you can't exactly clean a stable.  Freed up to be with Him, herself.  So.  As I want so badly to make my house perfect, and I probably will, and my life perfect for all the visitors that come and want to see Him, I will try to remember the earthy smell of hay and horses and know that to "prepare Him room" is really all that is needed.