I'll be home for Christmas, you can count on me ....

What is it about Christmas that brings out the nicest and nastiest in folks?

Christmas can be fuming, fiery blend. It is a time of unsurpassed unrealistic expectations and mind-bending nostalgia. All of this can be a recipe for stress, loneliness, disappointment and an acute sense of loss when loved ones are no longer around.

Now I am starting to sound just a smidgen negative and I don’t want to.

Perhaps there are two Christmas stories running at the same time:

1. The rather inconvenient story of the humble baby from Nazareth, born in a barn. The one who clearly enunciated that the way to happiness was to seek a both transcendent yet internal reality and presence that could not be gained by any temporal reliance on materialistic external factors.

2. Then there is that other story. Our own individual story that we concoct in our heads about just how our Christmases should (must?) be. “This Christmas Story” is fed by unceasing commercial and media propaganda. The story, more often than not, repeats the mantra that our personal happiness depends on external factors: presents, goodies, events, people and everything going perfectly (or at least semi-swimmingly).

So it seems at Christmas there is a quintessential clash of narratives. I confess, like many others, I often find myself caught swinging between the two stories.

Perhaps it is a clash between presence and presents.