[From my book, Christmas Memories from Seven to Seventy, available through amazon.com]
As my Mother’s brood of six got married and moved away, she often would cite two criteria when neighbors asked whether she had a “good” Christmas: If the weather was “pretty,” and if most of her
children were home, she had had “a good Christmas.”
With those two standards looming large, I learned I was expected to be home for Christmas. So I was with my parents every Christmas for 34 years.
In those 34 years, I had graduated from high school, college, and seminary; I had worked full-time as a minister, college professor and writer-editor; I had taken myself a wife; I had lived in Kentucky, South Carolina and Georgia.
Still, every year, I returned to my native Texas to be with my parents and assorted siblings, in-laws, and niece and nephews.
Only after I was a father myself did I begin to see “home for Christmas” from a different perspective: home was where my wife and our sons and I lived, rather than half a continent away where my parents lived.
Even after I became a father, a strong inner voice silently yelled, “Let’s go to Texas!” for as long as my parents were alive. Sometimes that call still comes, though Daddy and Mother both have long
since gone to that Eternal Home.
When Johnny Mathis gives out with “I’ll be home for Christmas; you can count on me,” in my mind's eye and in my heart of hearts, I am once again part of a happy throng of six brothers and sisters,
spouses, and children, overflowing one of the modest houses or apartments Mother and Daddy called home over the years.
Now and again, as Russell and Jonathan were growing up, we made the long trip across several states to be with my extended family. But, for the most part, we have been home for Christmas in the various places the four of us have called home: Georgia, Florida, Alabama, New York and South Carolina.
Many times over the years, not just at Christmas, I have felt I was the black sheep of the family. With the exception of years my younger sister Marie and her family spent in Ohio, the rest of the Webb clan could say, “We’re Texas born and Texas bred, and when we die, we’ll be Texas dead.” Marie and Don eventually wised up and went back to our Holy Land.
I have missed a great deal over the decades by not being around my brothers and sisters and their spouses. My one niece and most of my nephews have married and raised families, and I have not
been around to watch that next generation grow up. My sons have little awareness of their extended family.
Now, our sons have followed my example as they live and work in distant cities, far from their parents: New York and Chicago. They have their own individual patterns for the holidays, and I say,
“God bless them for it.”
Russell lives and works in lower Manhattan. He rarely comes South, for Christmas or otherwise.
Jonathan followed my pattern of returning to the nest at Christmas, never missing a season his first 27 years. When he missed year 28, it was not through his choice but through ours.
After Pansy and I both retired, we started talking about another trip to England. For various reasons, the earliest we could get away that year was mid-December.
Knowing Jonathan would probably be expecting to come down from Chicago, we tried to break the news gently: I wrote him a letter, which he never received. So gentle went out the window when I casually mentioned our travel plans in a phone call – first he had heard of it.
After the initial shock of not having home and parents to come back to, he seemed to take it in stride. I invited him to join us in London for at least Christmas weekend. I offered to pay a good share of his expenses. But the whole idea of no home to come back to at Christmas was more than he could adjust to on short notice.
So he stayed in the Windy City, spending extra time with Vicky, the young woman he was thinking of asking to marry him. He didn’t propose just then, but soon he did ask her. She agreed, they got
married, and now they have a son and a daughter.
People often ask, “Don’t you wish your sons would come home for Christmas?” I usually just smile or grimace, but I think to myself: “I would love to see them, but they are at home. They’re away from us, but they have their homes in Chicago and New York. They have their lives. They have their responsibilities. It isn’t easy to travel long distances, especially with little children.”
In his poem “The House of Christmas,” G. K. Chesterton described the call to come home this way:
For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Those lines suggest that every human being is away from home.
The Christmas story, after all, is about One who left his Father’s home, who was born in a manger, who in adulthood had no place to lay his head, who was buried in someone else’s tomb, who
identified his family as larger than his mother and birth brothers and sisters, a family “born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13).
So, whether we are with our human families this Christmas or spending the time alone or in a nursing home, we need to listen for the call of God, welcoming us to the warmth of His family. Jesus came to earth in order to call all his brothers and sisters back to his Father’s house.
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