FRA-GI-LE! The flesh is so easily broken.... so let's not break Christmas.

Seeing that Christmas is almost here prompted a memory from one of my favorite Christmas movies: A Christmas Story, which, by the way, is going to be on for twenty-four hours straight on TBS starting Christmas Eve and I can hardly wait. Yes, I do have it on DVD but that's not the point...Anyway I digress.  My memory: the father gets a "major award" that comes in a crate marked with the letters F-R-A-G-I-L-E.  He notices it and pronounces it wrong following it up with "...it must be Italian."  His wife then corrects him "I think that says fragile, honey."

For a couple of months, every now and then, I have pondered that word, especially when it refers to human beings.  Just today I starting reading articles on a major news network site and found two stories reporting sad news within three minutes of when I first got on the site.  The first one reports that Karen Swift, a 44 year old mother of 4 children had been missing for a short time and her body was found today among some bushes near a cemetery only two miles from her home.karen swift  The other tells of a three year old boy in Malaysia who was seriously injured while visiting a zoo where an animal escaped and attacked him.boy attacked  Car accidents, murders, cancer, self-inflicted wounds...all ways we are hurt or killed, with many more out there just waiting to happen to any one of us just living our lives.  We are fragile, just as fragile, in many ways, as that spider we slapped flat that dared to enter our house, or that cat who never listened to it's mother when she told it to look both ways before walking across the street.  We are fragile and always in harms way.  We can't avoid the fact that bad things can happen, that bad things do happen to everyone at one time or another.  I think that's why it's important to have Christmas in our lives every 25th of December.  It gives us an opportunity, if we choose to take advantage of it, to take stock of what and who surrounds us.  I have a wonderful, drafty, cracks on the walls and a leak on the ceiling, four walls, separate bedrooms for all the members of my family, solid floors and nice looking house provided by the church for us to live in.  I have two cranky, demanding, sometimes stinky, loud, loving, cuddling, growing too fast children.

There are many more things and people I could mention but I hope your getting the point.  Christmas is here for us to celebrate a life that was brought into this world to give us life and to give us opportunities to stop and remember life is short, we are fragile so take time to enjoy it.  That's why I say it can't hurt to celebrate Christmas, if your Christian or not.  Jesus, again, has given a gift for these poor, breakable souls in this world and that gift isn't just himself, but a time to pause, reflect, laugh and gather.   So, next time your out tell someone Merry Christmas.  Don't be afraid or intimidated to remind others how this celebration this time of the year started.  Be reminded that love is in the air only if you breath it in and then pass it on to someone else. 
O.K., I'll stop rambling now. 
Merry Christmas!
Enjoy it!