Merry complicated Christmas…

Rachael O.

Phillips Extraordinary Ordinary

When you and your family plan Christmas gettogethers, do you feel like an unpaid air-traffic controller in O’Hare, trying to land everyone in the right spot on the right day?

Me too. Especially as when I was a child, my parents kept Christmas Day simple. This, despite my mother’s 11-sibling clan, many of whom lived nearby. We could have celebrated Christmas Day together. If we rented the Indiana State Fairgrounds. My siblings and I should have realized such a bash would have generated tons of presents.

Why did we not figure that out and go on strike?

However, my father, who worked full-time and pastored full-time, reserved Christmas as the one day of the year he could sleep in until eight. Mom, an incredibly busy pastor’s wife, was also peopled out by Advent. Christmas Day focused on our immediate family – odd, but nice. We enjoyed a few gifts wrapped in funny papers. Like most children, I believed everyone did Christmas our way.

During college, I discovered otherwise. My parents had moved to Oregon, while I remained at Indiana University. My boyfriend’s caring parents invited me to their home during the holidays.

Culture shock.

My numero uno’s extended family gathered at Christmas: grandparents, one aunt, one uncle and three cousins. They had not been fruitful and multiplied like my tribe. Hadn’t they ever read the Bible?

This group followed the same schedule every Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The same menus, down to the cheese plate on Grandma Phillips’s table and cookie plate at Grandma Norris’s house.

Had I entered the Christmas Twilight Zone?

They intended to continue that pattern until

See PHILLIPS, page A6

From page A4

Jesus’ Second Advent.

As young marrieds, Hubby and I blasted that fantasy.

The I.U. Medical School did not promise students Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off. Nor did Hubby’s residency program. Little did my in-laws realize his rural family practice would generate challenges that made those early Christmases simple.

Impatient, new babies and those with broken legs or sputtering hearts did not follow the Perfect Phillips Plan.

Also, I became a church worship director. Do these go home for Christmas? Not until the last carol is sung and the last shepherd has tripped over his crook.

How did we solve the gatheraround- the-tree dilemma? We hosted. Every year.

Nothing like buying a scraggly tree December 23 to hyperventilate an already frantic Christmas.

Though both Hubby and I are semiretired now, spending special time as a family during this special season has not grown easier.

Our children chose helping professions that defy calendars and clocks. Two are (what can I say?) church worship leaders. Their children attend schools that secretly collaborate to crisscross holiday plans. Playing in concerts, marching in national parades, competing in sports, working at jobs – should grandchildren be allowed to complicate Christmas? We never did that to our families.

… Even pets – like one family’s tree-climbing cats and a devil-possessed canine – conspire to sabotage get-togethers.

Toss in vengeful weather, surprise highway constructions and random flight cancellations – not to mention furnace and plumbing collapses – and some of us not only want to ditch Christmas gatherings, but to change our identities.

Perhaps Mary and Joseph felt that way too. The first Christmas resembled a combination of a soap opera and disaster movie.

First, they had to travel.

Worse, they did not anticipate receiving presents. Instead, they would pay taxes to the Roman Empire that considered them slaves. Even worse, Mary was nine months pregnant. Could they afford the donkey that appears in Bible story books, but not the Bible? Walking is good for expectant mothers, but 70plus miles? Over rugged terrain, with no Holiday Inn Express? Joseph’s Bethlehem relatives evidently did not welcome the couple, even when Mary went into labor.

Perhaps they thought she deserved what she got. And that little Jesus was a smear on their family’s name. Who wanted a screaming newborn around during the holidays, anyway?

And we thought a “nonstop” flight to Florida that hopped to Salt Lake City and Seattle caused infinite pain.

Yet, despite the wrenching struggles of that first Christmas, nothing could stop God’s Perfect Plan to give His perfect Son to our troubled world. Nothing roadblocked His love.

Should we let loony logistics, weird relatives and slow Amazon Prime arrivals barricade our love too?

If we do, we might, like Joseph’s kin, miss a complicated, but Perfect Christmas.

Rachael O. Phillips is an upbeat, offbeat storyteller who embraces the extraordinary ordinary, even in a singlestoplight town. She runs a blog, “ Extraordinary Ordinary,” offering hometown humor that will loosen those uptight muscles and thoughts to put a grin on your face. She has written 27 books and contributed to others about people, fictional and real, who cannot stay out of trouble!

“ People just like us. But God loves the human race anyway.

That’s an everyday fact we often shrug off as ordinary.”

Learn more at rachaelophillips. com