Air Force ‘mob’ is my Christmas Moment

If you’ve read my musings for any length of time, you know that each year I anticipate the Christmas Moment as the holiday approaches.

The Moment is when I know I’m in the spirit of Christmas - of family, of belonging, of renewal.

Some years, such as last year, I was concerned that it might not arrive at all. But, as always and as reliably as the North Star, it did.

But this year, as of right now, it’s a done deal, thanks to Facebook, Claire Fournier and the United States Air Force Band.

I do my fair share of Facebook trolling. Claire Fournier is the mother of my son-in-law John, married to my daughter Elizabeth. She is one of my FB friends.

Claire, in a Christmas mood herself after completing decorating the house, found and posted a National Public Radio blog about a flash mob the Air Force band pulled off at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Though it may not technically be a flash mob, band members on Dec. 8 came together in pieces to perform “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” from “The Messiah” by Bach. The band and the singers transitioned into “Joy to the World.”

See it here:

I don’t know that there’s anything more emotive to me at time than music. The right song at the right time will undo me. This is one.

I trust it’ll bring a tear or two or three of Christmas joy to your heart and soul. It did to mine.

A harder wait for the Christmas moment

It’s that time of year when I wait for the Christmas moment that defines the meaning of rebirth, renewal and hope.

Frankly, given recent events, the moment might be harder to come by. And, rather than wait for it to come, I might have to go in search of it this year.

My Christmas season doesn’t start until the Advent season, no matter how hard advertisers try to push Christmas on us so soon after Halloween.

Let me get through Thanksgiving. Let me get through the godawful Black Friday nonsense. Then, and only then, will I start turning my attention to Christmas.

But this year the Advent weeks have been hard on me.

First, I lost a mentor and friend, Peter Watson, to a brain tumor at age 73.

But Peter was no ordinary 73-year-old.. He was fit, fit enough to run up Mt. Washington every year. And he was active. He should have been around for many, many more years, keeping tabs and visiting occasionally on the many, many journalists who passed through his doors and under his watch for so many years.

Then of course there was the news out of Newtown, Conn., and the unfathomable killing of 20 children and six staffers at the elementary school there..

This was crushing. Sandy Hook Elementary School is a neighborhood school in suburban Connecticut just as Centerville Elementary School, where my two children attended, is a neighborhood school in suburban Massachusetts.

It could have been any school, USA. I can’t remember a time when I’ve wept more over the course of a week.

I hoped church on Sunday would help. I find comfort in music.And ‘tis the season for Christmas carols.

“Lo, How a  Rose Ere Blooming,” with its rose a metaphor for the birth of Christ, helped: “True Man, yet very God, from sin and death He saves us, And lightens every load.”

It was a moment, but not The Moment.

The altar at Mass on Sunday was lit with 20 candles, one of each of the children, one for each new angel.

My daughter Elizabeth, her husband John, my son David, and other family --  by blood and by marriage -- start arriving today.

During the course of two house parties over the next several days, my wife Jane and I will host upwards of 45 people.

Maybe it won’t be a Moment this year. Maybe it will be a collection of Moments, individual embraces and exchanges of smiles  that show love as a bright light in the dark.

A time for every purpose

Every Christmas I look forward to that Moment that helps redefine and remind me what the season is all about.

It didn’t happen this year, and that’s okay because instead of a Moment helping remind me of the meaning of the season, various events of the season reminded me of the importance of family.

And when I talk of family, I’m talking about family in the broadest, most extended of terms.

Our extended family in the course of eight days experienced a death and a funeral, a Christmas open house for 30 people, and a birth.

And through each emotional phase, family leaned on family for support and it didn’t matter if it was child or stepchild, husband or ex-husband, wife or ex-wife, husband of ex-wife, or wife of ex-husband, mother or mother-in-law, father or father-in-law.

The extended family has been redefined by marriages, divorces and remarriages. Families become a blended blend of far-reaching ingredients.

As it was, this was going to be a Perfect Storm Christmas.

My very large family gets together every other year to celebrate the holiday, usually at my mother’s in Maine with the opening of presents and feasting on roast beast.

This year, however, my wife Jane’s family was also gathering here in anticipation of a Jan. 1 due date of a first granddaughter.

So Jane and I volunteered to make our home Christmas Day Central for an open house and buffet for about 30 people.

But, during the run-up in our preparations, Jane’s ex-husband’s wife Cheryl passed away, fighting the good fight against cancer for as long as she could.

Focus shifted. Emotional strength marshaled. We cried at the loss. Celebrated the life.

All this against the backdrop that Cheryl’s daughter Jenn is getting married on New Year’s Day.

And then we immediately upshifted to celebrate Christmas Day with food, drink, the din of conversation and the merriment of Christmas songs.

And wouldn’t you know? The baby that wasn’t due until New Year’s Day decided she wanted to be born on the day after Christmas.

Stepdaughter Kelsey and her husband Jeremy headed to the hospital within a few hours after our party ended.

So focus shifted again. More emotional strength was marshaled. And family gathered at the hospital to await the birth of Rylin Anne, the newest member of our extended family.

Now Rylin shares the same birthday as her aunt, Reilly, Jane’s daughter and Kelsey’s sister.

Through the week, as events shifted and emotions ran from high to low and low to high, the song “Turn, Turn, Turn” by the Byrds kept spinning around in my head:

To everything Turn, Turn, Turn

There is a season Turn, Turn, Turn

And a time to every purpose, under Heaven.

Taken from Ecclesiastes it was one of the readings at Cheryl’s funeral mass.

And I guess if there was a Christmas Moment, that was at close as it came:

… A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

… A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

We did it all in the course of eight days.

Looking again for The Christmas Moment

I close myself off to Christmas at Halloween. I refuse to accept the season at a time of ghosts and goblins. I hate that retailers are forcing the season on the public ever earlier. Pretty soon, the first Christmas sales will start to accompany Back to School sales.

I don't start to open myself up to the notion of Christmas until the first of December. And then it's normally a gradual process of getting into the spirit.

Part of the process is what I've come to call my Christmas Moment.

It's when I know I'm in the zone and zen of Christmas. It has nothing to do with shopping, it has nothing to do with the frenzy, it has everything to do with the feeling about Christmas.

Normally it's associated with music, and usually it occurs late in the season, like at church on Christmas Eve.

Trouble is ... I might have already had my moment in the most unlikely of places, the gym.

I was in the middle of adjusting a Nautilaus weight machine when I heard Paul Potts come through the headphones of my iPod singing, "O, Holy Night."

Now, I have relatively few Christmas songs among the 1,500 or so I have stored on my iPod. And a Christmas song very rarely comes on when I have the iPod set to randomly play music when I work work out at the gym.

So the fact that I heard a Christmas song on my iPod was unusual. The fact that it would be "O, Holy Night" -- one of my Christmas favorites -- was also unusual.

And I did get that wash of reflective satisfaction come over me as I listened to Potts sing. Potts, you see, isn't very well known as a singer. He was a winner of the United Kingdom version of "American Idol" a couple of years back. He was a nobody selling cell phones, won the competition and started recording albums of classical music -- a great story of the everyman who finds a way to rise above his ordinariness.

At any rate, I figure the Moment has to count. How could it not? It met all the qualifications I impose upon it every year.

But I've judged that it was too easy.

So I'm on the search for Moment II. I'm looking for a Moment double dip.

And I think it'll be pretty easy to find because my very large, very boisterous family is supposed to coalesce at my mother's.

And that's a Moment, let me tell you, several in fact.

Give the peace of summer a chance

One of my pet peeves is the marketing of holidays. Each year, it seems, advertisers start to trump a particular holiday earlier and earlier in order to spur sales. Last year, for example, we hadn't even gotten to Halloween when the advertising promotions for Christmas started. Now it's back to school that's getting me riled.

I know back to school isn't a holiday, but it's a significant seasonal event like Halloween or Thanksgiving or Christmas; it's an event that makes us sit up and take notice. The thing about back to school is that parents of students should sit up and take notice in August, as the month starts to nudge toward Labor Day. But we were barely beyond the Fourth of July when I noticed advertising inserts in my newspaper that were keyed to back-to-school sales. This drives me nuts.

In the same way that we have a biological clock, we also have a seasonal clock tied to the things that happen during the spring, summer, winter and fall. The rhythm of the seasons is important in the transition from one equinox to the other, especially for those of us in New England where the seasons can be so extreme from one to the other. Come Labor Day we can start the transition toward fall but not before. I'll accept Thanksgiving as the transition point to the Christmas season, but I don't accept Halloween as that transition point. Nor do I accept July 4 as the transition point from summer to back to school.

This must have caught the attention of the smart people at the Wall Street Journal who on Monday wrote a story about the earlier back-to-school advertising. According to the Journal story, back to school is the retailers' second-biggest selling period behind Christmas. And this year is especially important because consumers, battered by high gas prices and a jittery economy, aren't in much of a spending mood.

The Journal estimated spending for back-to-school and college related merchandise will be flat to slightly lower this year compared to last year, which saw a slight uptick in spending in large part because of must-have electronic items such as cell phones and music players. There isn't a must-have item this year, according to the Journal story. In an effort to distinguish themselves from a discount retailer such as Wal-Mart, said to the Journal, major retail chains have created marketing campaigns to attract the attention of consumers. Kohl's, for example, is launching a back-to-school clothes and accessories line from singer Avril Lavigne.

The whole thing strikes me as back-to-school chaos. I don't have back-to-school kids who I have to worry about any more. My son David, who'll be a college senior, is low maintenance when it comes time to start classes again. But you can see the change in pace and attitude in the general population when the time comes to go back to school. There's no need to hurry that along. We need to invite less stress, not more stress into our lives and summer is the time to concentrate on less stress.

Everything is relative, of course. Summers are not as stress free as I remember them. We're buffeted by the turbulence of uncertainty about our jobs, the economy, climate change, our children's future, our future. But we should be able to use summer to ratchet down the apprehension. Summer should allow us to melt stress as quickly as ice cubes in iced tea on a 90-degree day. We should be able to sit on the ocean beach or the lake shore and read a book that takes us away from the here and now. We should be able to hike and bike, canoe and kayak, sun and surf, relax and rejuvenate under the glare of the sun, not the glare of desperate merchandisers.

They only fuel the anxiety at a time when our tank of anxiety should be allowed to run empty.