Those post-Christmas blahs

Every year when the Christmas decorations go up I find myself shaking my head -- they look so... tacky! We've never been very conscious about acquiring "a look" for Christmas, so almost everything has been given to us by friends, family, or our children. And of course that red and green color scheme is totally at odds with our muted northwest style, sticking out like a sore thumb against the subtle grays, greens and blues that echo the sky and sea outside the windows.

But over the course of the season we grow accustomed to the bright colors, the lights on the tree, the silly dolls and garish stockings. And when they all come down, as they did, finally, yesterday (though the tree is still dripping needles in the corner of the living room), the room looks painfully dull and empty. That dull emptiness took over my meditation this morning. And so many responses sprang to mind:

1. I should buy something more colorful that could hang right there, where the stockings were, to liven up that dull stoniness.
2. Oh, God. It's like this empty colorless room mirrors the empty dullness that is winter, that lives in my heart right now.
3. If I were to take a chisel, and chip away at the sand-colored stone wall around my heart, would color emerge, like flowers in spring? Or would it all just turn to dust?
4. How did I ever think these dull colors were beautiful? Have I somehow deliberately damped down my natural exuberance, settled for less?
5. This morning I was reading about the extravagant generosity of Jesus' self-emptying. Is this what it is like, when all passion has been spent?
6. Or is that crazy brief flare of color at Christmas time like fireworks, or whistling in the dark: a last attempt to deny the cross that lies ahead?

Wherever the truth may lie, it seems that -- just as all that garish color has a way of clarifying the gap between the joy we're supposed to feel at Christmas and the sense of emptiness that so often rises to the surface in this season of light -- the stripping of the room symbolizes the fleeting nature of earthly pleasures and the necessity of learning to live with the rock-hard reality that lives below the surface.

It makes me think of that Dylan Thomas poem. Not A Child's Christmas in Wales, the one we most often think of in this season; the other famous one:

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night...

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.