c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) With Windham Hill’s haunting “Celtic Christmas III” filling the living room, my 13-year-old son and I string lights on our Christmas tree, while my wife hangs the stockings with care.

I remember my father doing this duty in what seems another lifetime, in that childhood when my images of Christmas were formed. He was fatigued by Christmas business then, as I am now, but he dug deep, as fathers do, and gave a Christmas gift to his family. I do so tonight, because it was done to me.

Lights twinkling, we hang our odd assortment of ornaments. The golden pear that we acquired for our first Christmas 27 years ago, “Baby’s First Christmas” from 1979, various handmade ornaments from our boys’ preschool days, treasured tokens from churches I served, stray shiny things that somehow appeared, and to top it off, the sheepskin angel that my wife made.

I remember my mother unwrapping a comparable assortment of treasures, dating back to wartime and rationing, and continuing through our journey to the house that I still consider “home.” It seemed effortless then, but I now know that she, too, was digging deep to give her family a gift.

In days to come, this highway of life will carry our sons to other houses, other branches of family, other living rooms, other trees, other ornaments. As husbands and dads, they will dig deep for their families. I pray that they will work alongside good women, as has been my father’s blessing and mine, and in due season honor the gift and heritage of children by bringing hope into their homes.

We tend to start adulthood as exiles, living far from what God envisions as our homes, among strangers who don’t love us as we need to be loved, in places that aren’t yet worthy of the name “home.” We need to be shown the highway and to have its rough places made plain. We need to be shown how to give. We need partners to walk alongside us.

We need to know, when the Birth of Jesus comes around again, that each year finds us different, and that what we give isn’t the routine of “doing Christmas” one more time. What we give is a glimpse of grace, a taste of that sweetness which it is God’s good pleasure to give us. What we give is a memory of being loved.

Some years are more light-hearted than others, some more burdened. Even when the same faces gather around the tree, it is always a fresh assembly. In time, sons become fathers, daughters become mothers, siblings scatter and decorate trees in far-flung places, and all the while our children are preparing for their own scattering time. I watch my wife unwrap ornaments on this 28th Christmas together, and I think what a brave woman she is, to leave childhood and family and to go forth on the highway.

The prophet Isaiah understood that exiles aren’t always itching to go home. The Israelites had grown accustomed to Babylon, and if they thought of Zion at all, they saw it as impossibly distant, across a fearsome desert. Our exiles can seem like that, too: comfortable in their own way, familiar at least, and preferable to the arduous journey onward.

Isaiah didn’t sing cute songs or promise easy happiness. He sang of a God who would not allow people to “go astray,” a powerful and faithful lover who would lay a highway for the redeemed to walk home. This is what our families can be: not cute, not easy happiness, but a gift from God to make our journeys possible.

MO/JL END RNS

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. Visit his Web site at http://www.onajourney.org.)