It’s the weekend after Thanks- giving, and I just can’t keep from noticing that it’s remarkably like almost every weekend after Thanksgiving in recent decades.
After the bustle of preparing for our usual
Friday afternoon we managed to overcome the holiday inertia long enough to drag the Christmas decorations down from the attic. Precise rows of red lights now line the roof and sidewalk edges.
Nothing about this weekend seems to change. Even the Christmas light vandals appeared on time. By Saturday morning some mental midgets stole two of our luminaria and trashed half the sidewalk lights.
By Saturday night the last scraps of Thursday’s scrumptious turkey turned into sandwiches and the last sliver of pecan pie wiped out what was left of somebody’s diet. After so much rich food, bologna has begun to sound more and more like a delicacy.
Three days of highly touted football games have now been played. As always, I slept through most of those I tried to watch. There were some awful calls and memorable plays. I think. After so much turkey, napping seemed a far better pastime than rooting.
That’s how we wound up Thanks-giving at our house again this year.
Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but the very sameness of our holiday rituals enhances their value to me. Instead of boring me, they bless me, almost in direct proportion to the number of years we have repeated them. Somehow, as we perform the same motions and reenact the same scenes, the joy of Thanksgivings past awakens to warm our hearts again.
It’s that way for me at church, too, these days. As my years accumulate, the preciousness of oft-repeated hymns and scriptures also is multiplied. Far more touching to me than avant garde liturgies and clever phrases of praise are the time-proven expressions of faith that have worn ruts in the hollows of my soul.
Like the Thanksgiving turkey and the homely rituals that
follow its demise, so the Lord’s prayer and the 23rd Psalm and the stories of