The house cleaning people were two hours late, so I thought, “They got their tips from the last customer; no need to tip them today.”   But I tipped them anyway, though I had no desire to be seen as a soft touch.  After all, it was Christmas time.

How we apply the sayings of Christ is entirely up to us, and I don’t want to be a Scrooge.  I’ll make my decisions magnificently, not pejoratively.  There’s no doubt the time of the year helped me.

We weak human beings need all the help we can get, like urgings from Scripture and seasons.  Here’s to my welfare this new year.

A farmer of an alpine region of Switzerland (Valais) was recently consoled by the media for serving several short periods in jail for growing cannabis.  Poor child.  He has probably never read a book about the vicissitudes of life.  Some people never develop the addiction to cannabis; others, sometimes fatally, do.

My oldest son, Greg, acquired the addiction in high school.  It didn’t seem to phase him and he finished college to acquire a job as a research chemist for what was then an adjunct to Pfizer.  He did his short-lived work then; discovering seven versions of rapamycin, the drug for recipients of donated organs.  But the devil doesn’t rest.  He was fired for his addiction, and later died a suicide.  Grow cannabis, eh Mr. farmer?

If a doctor prescribes it, that’s a different case.  Someone knows the risks, not a poor farmer.

Christmas time brings back a nostalgia that is harder to appreciate with some loss of hearing.  I used to listen to American and European carols, but now I have to sit next to the boom box.  I was a choir boy in elementary school, and Sister Edith had us sing beautiful carols I never knew before.

My Dad, though he earned a nice living, was as frugal as always.  On Dec. 24 he brought home the Christmas tree ($3) and I learned how to cut off an imbalanced branch, bore a hole in the appropriate spot on the trunk, and reinsert it.  After all, what did we have tools for?

It’s still a wonderful time of the year, and our cumulative past makes it richer.

In the book, Looking for the Good War, the author, Elizabeth D. Samet, points out that sometimes we tell ourselves stories about the good we do.  These stories may not always agree with the facts.

Only God can be aware of all the facts, and his view, in the end, is the one that counts.  We can come close to that view, but for our own sake, that is still a skewed view.  We may exhilarate or depress ourselves with it.

I pray that I adopt, not a misleading view, but an elevating view (MAGA comes to mind) not to deceive myself but to keep up my spirits, and to keep up my relation with God, who knows all sides.  I am sinful enough so I don’t need to dwell overly long on the mistakes others have made.

It was a peaceful Christmas, the only one that I remember my wife and I spent alone.  We watched Midnight Mass at Washington D.C.’s Basilica (what a church!) of the Immaculate Conception and though we didn’t get all of the nuncio’s sermon (he has a heavy French accent), we felt the awesomeness of the occasion.

Of course, the pandemic was the cause of our isolation.  We pray that we’ll soon be relieved of it, and at least make it through safely.  But God has his own ways, and we abide by them.

The Lord has such miraculous ways of bringing good out of evil that I can’t presume to predict the outcome of this pandemic.  I await that with hope.