December's Joys

By Beth Yarbrough

I first posted this one last Christmas, and it still holds true.

Savoring the month of December is a bit like the process of savoring a soup or stew that has been in the works for hours, each addition adding something wonderfully fragrant or flavorful or soul-satisfying to the mix, so that the longer it simmers, the more complex and beautiful it becomes.

In that light, how is it possible to savor this month without calling up all of the Decembers we have known - each one adding a hint of this or a pinch of that to the whole?

For some of us, earliest memories center around pre-dawn Christmas mornings spent around the family tree, or maybe it was hearing The Beatles singing I Wanna Hold Your Hand for the first time or Nat King Cole singing The Christmas Song for the hundreth time (and never tiring of it), or the smell of wood smoke from neighborhood chimneys, or an indigo sky filled with stars.

And even when all grown up with children of our own, the layers deepened. I remember one frigid Christmas Eve morning when our teenage daughter walked down to a neighbor’s house to deliver a gift and came home with an adorable little puppy, half frozen, who cried out to her from underneath a parked car. He immediately became a member of the family, growing into an enormous bundle of love who blessed us for more than a decade.

There were years of Christmas Eve memories when our house began to fill with an expanding set of neighborhood friends and their children, one such evening featuring Santa Claus riding up to the front door on a Harley Davidson that had a red bow and my husband’s name on it.

The Christmas cantatas and children’s plays at church and at school, parades, tree lightings, live nativities, and night-time drives to look at lights, traces of them all still linger when December rolls around.

And one unforgettable year will forever rank at the top of my list. We were getting ready for the annual Christmas Eve party, and I was making yet another pass through the house, checking to make sure every ornament, bow, and bough of greenery was behaving itself, when a small voice stopped me in my tracks. “Your house looks great, but what about your heart?”

I couldn’t get to the phone fast enough to pass the thought along to our dear friend, Charlie Tipton - whose talent on a piano was equaled only by a voice (and a laugh) that could shake rafters.

Charlie and I frequently shared ideas for songs (I forgot to mention that his talents extended to composing as well) and when I called him with this one, he laughed his big laugh and said, “I’m on it. Stay tuned.”

Literally within just an hour or two, he called back and said, “Go to YouTube”. And I did - and here was the result.

There is no one I know who loved Christmas and enjoyed savoring the month of December any better than Charlie. And as it turned out, that Christmas would be his last. A sudden heart attack took him home to Heaven the following July.

So as I sit here tonight under a full moon, it is all of these things that I savor, each of them a delicious part of the whole, coming back to me in the quiet moments to remind me that, during this of all months, we should enjoy the season and always remember the Reason.