Random Christmas

Thanksgiving is just past us now. The overly commercial presence of Christmas which has been creeping up and growing more obnoxious since Halloween in all the stores has now caught up with itself. 'Tis truly the Season now, and with a sigh, we move into it...

But this is what has caught my eye, rather than all the glitz, tinsel and artificial plastic decorations.

Out beyond my neighborhood, where no developments have sprung up, no stores have moved in, it is still nothing but scrub grass and steep hills that graze cattle on either side of the road. Trees ride the ridge lines in the distance and there is no sense of civilization hovering at either end of the little bypass as you navigate the middle. Down in the high yellow grass at the pavement's verge, there are tiny volunteer pines that have sprung up here and there, 10, 20, 30 yards apart, seedlings blown by nature and not planted by man.

A few days ago I was driving towards my house down this road and did a double take...someone, quite randomly and for no rhyme or reason other than sheer joy, had made their way to one of the little trees, and they had decorated it with Christmas decorations! There it stands, all by itself, perhaps no more than four feet tall, with tinsel and Christmas ornaments glinting and swaying in the breeze of passing traffic. Somebody was practicing random kindness and senseless acts of beauty and decorated a random anonymous tree on a busy road, for no other reason than the joy that it might bring! I pulled the car over and got a picture.

The commercialism fades away and the artificiality is gone - for me the real Spirit of Christmas this year began on a paved cut through road devoid of everything save trees and scrub, as a gift from a stranger...Lets pass it on, people. What can each of us do, to randomly represent the true Christmas/Solstice/Yule spirit?

Let us give, with love, to the stranger at our gates...