Honie Briggs

Preparations are under way for Honie’s Holiday Hootenanny 2012. Sweet treats and savory morsels will fill Fiestaware on every flat surface – standard holiday fare – cheese balls, sausage balls, rum balls. You’ve gotta have balls this time of year. Calories roll right off of round food.

Spending the mortgage money on frivolities? Don’t forget the batteries. All around the world people will eat, drink and be merry from now until the wee hours of 2013; except in places where they won’t. The season to be mean for no reason has passed and now everybody loves everybody, except those who don’t. There’ll be no visions of sugar-plum fairies and zombies slugging it out in the figgy pudding, unless nutcrackers stand guard.

It’s ChristmaHanukKwanzakah. The time of year for hope, renewal, peppermint, depression, house fires caused by unattended candles, weight gain caused by eating too much square food. I think anyone who has read much here knows my belief that some topics/people don’t deserve attention. I don’t give my personal “take” on things going on in the lives of others that I believe should remain private. I don’t write about religion, mainly because I am not a theologian, but mostly because for all the talk about that slippery slope, nobody knows better than I how badly one can skin one’s ass on the descent of such a slope. Keeping it real and loving you all, in the purely platonic sense of course, I write what I know, things I think, stuff that makes me laugh. Sharing beauty and happiness is easy enough when you have it to share; revealing struggles and heartbreak, a bit more challenging. There may be thousands of people willing to do it, but there are millions who would never dream of baring their soul for public scrutiny.

For all the tidings of good news and great joy of the Christmas season I have never fully understood the enormous loss of life connected with this season. Even from the original story, all male children under the age of two slaughtered in the search for Jesus? No one talks about it. Throughout recorded history people have been ostracized, murdered even, for following Jesus AND for not believing in Jesus. Humans have made The Prince of Peace cause for war and yet we still look to the night sky for that star of wonder. During the Christmas season the lonely and suffering fall on their knees, listening for the sound of angels’ voices. Some take their own lives out of incomprehensible despair.

How does hope, condensed into one season, stop the unspeakable acts of cruelty and violence inflicted in all seasons all over the planet in the name of all that is holy? Why don’t we let heaven and nature sing? Will there ever be peace on earth? I am unapologetic for questioning it and I won’t quit until I get an answer.

Now who’s in the mood for a party?