December 11, 2024 It’s one of our rules when we go on vacations or “adventures,” as we like to call them. On every trip we take and at every football game we attend, the Fargos buy or find a Christmas ornament or something that can be turned into a Christmas ornament. There are ornaments representing the professional football stadiums or teams in 10 different cities (we put the ornaments representing teams we don’t like toward the back). There’s an ornament with Santa standing on the moon from the time I went to Kennedy Space Center in Florida with my friend, Alexis. There’s a shiny ornament featuring an exterior view of the U.S. Capitol. There’s an ornament version of Alcatraz on our tree, as well. Of course, we also have all the ornaments made by my son, Jake, over the years – all the ones with crooked, glued-on decorations – as well as a few made by nieces and nephews. We have a few other ornaments that are sentimental for other reasons, mostly because of who gave them to us. We’ve been collecting these ornaments for over a decade, and every ornament on the tree represents a time, a person or a place – something we want to remember, and every year, decorating the tree is a trip down memory lane. As we decorated the tree this year, handling some of these ornaments for the eighth, ninth or tenth time, it struck me how my reaction to those memories has changed over the years. In some cases, ornaments that once represented very happy times now give me a tinge of sadness as I think about people who were with me during those times but who are no longer here to make more memories. While I always loved the ornaments made in pre-school or kindergarten classes, they warm my heart more now than they did when I received them, as now they remind me how far removed Jake is from that young man who had profound speech delays and other deficits related to his autism and how much he has progressed. The ornaments and the stories are the same, but how I feel about them is different. I sometimes fall into the trap of tuning out the scripture readings at Mass. “I’ve heard it all before,” I think. But that was old me who heard it. God keeps working on me and in me. I’m not who I was the last time these readings were read at Mass. If I made a conscious effort to take them in carefully, if I take some time to hang them on my tree, so to speak, they may mean something different than they did before. God certainly speaks to us through his sacred word. I’m trying to make it a rule to pay better attention and see what adventures God takes me on. |
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