Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

It’s Christmas.

A Christmas story. Of course, I should write a Christmas story. That’s what newspaper reporters are expected to do when the paper comes out on Christmas Day.

It used to be an easy story to write, so many cheery images to choose from, like ornaments dangling from the green spruce tree — Joy to the World, Ho Ho Ho.

But this year… it’s different, the images are out of focus, disorienting, and I can’t imagine how anybody could not be feeling it, too. It’s in all the news. Dateline… Bethlehem… Joseph and Mary flee the hounds of war with the newborn child the world’s been waiting for.

So, what is the story? I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer or Pollyanna. Just what’s the news. Where to begin? Will it ever end?

Like philosophical reality, like Riemannian equations, Christmas lives on many floors of the same building ­— physical/metaphysical, yin/yang, give/get.

Until we have all the earthly possessions we could ever desire, it tends to be overshadowed by the get.

I could tell my story of the nights before Christmas as a child imagining what I might get in the morning — a BB gun, a Lionel train set, knitted socks and mittens.

Even years later, after I’d been run out of Detroit and was managing small town weeklies in Nebraska and had to pay more attention to the business side of the operation, Christmas was still very much about the get. Like elections, it brought in more ad revenue. It was my job to write stories that got people into the mood.

When I was an over-the-road trucker, I knew all the truck-stop cafes where you could get a free Christmas dinner if you were a trucker with a valid CDL.

But on another floor of the building where Christmas lives in the mind, it’s about giving to get… sacrificing for the promise of a greater reward.

When the kids are little, we sacrifice our time in long checkout lines for the reward of seeing the look on their excited faces.

The Dominicans told us to sacrifice all of ourselves to the baby Jesus for the promise of receiving something far greater than ourselves in return. The idea was ritualized by fasting the entire day before Midnight Mass. Then, after Communion in the great stone Cathedral and the echoed sound of Latin chants, we’d march back home through the snow for the Consecrated Feast of Great Grandma Thibaut’s French-Canadien Christmas Meat Pie.

The baby Jesus would one day sacrifice himself to the tortures of the dogs of war and then, with his final breath, shared with the world his greater reward. “Forgive them,” he said, “for they know not what they do.”