Advent

The guests have gone home, the turkey bones have hit the trash, the last of the pumpkin pie has disappeared from the refrigerator. The Christmas catalogs are stacking up precariously on the dining room table. The season is upon us. The countdown has begun.

For kids, the next 25 days are going to be sheer agony. Maybe you and I never actually begged our parents for a "Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot Range Model air rifle," but we all begged for something. As we watch the famous Christmas movie, we empathize fully with Ralphie's agonies of uncertainty and anticipation. Whether it was a BB gun or an electric train or a dollhouse or an Xbox or a Wii, most of us, at one time or another, had some Christmas present that we longed for desperately, some dazzling possession without which happiness in this life seemed well nigh impossible.

Sometimes we got it, sometimes we didn't. And even when we got it, we later admitted to ourselves that -- once we got it -- it never quite justified all the hopes and fantasies we had invested in it. Such disappointments, we gradually discovered, make up one of the ironic little tragedies of human life -- a childhood disappointment that was to have plenty of adult counterparts.

But our minds nevertheless seem hard-wired to dream and to anticipate, to look beyond the dreary present to a magically joyful future. At times, such bright dreams may seem the only road of escape from the darkness of our present. Just as primitive man, hunkered down in the cold and dark of winter, looked forward with hope to the solstice, to the date when days would once more start growing longer. Just as we in our own time, hunkered down in the throes of a recession, watch hopefully for signs that the economy is reviving, that good times are returning.

And just as men and women in every century, their own lives mired in poverty and hopelessness, have been able to survive the present by dreaming of better lives for their children, better lives that would give meaning to their own suffering.

So we look forward. We await the light, we await better times. We await a child in whom we can place our hopes. Throughout history, not only individuals have longed for a better world, a more meaningful life, but entire nations. And perhaps even all of humanity.

And so, like a bunch of kids ourselves, we eagerly anticipate the coming of Christmas. But, sadder now (and also wiser) than we were as kids, we long for a sturdier form of happiness, something with a lot more legs than the excitement of getting a BB gun. Or of finding a job, or winning a war.

A Christmas gift that gives us a different kind of joy, a gift that won't disappoint us as soon as we receive it. Twenty-five days to ponder such a gift, to ask Santa for it. Twenty-five days to Christmas!