BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… ONCE UPON A CHRISTMAS. The wind was a ragged squall line in the dark, blowing hard over the Missouri Ozarks, dropping temperatures some 30 degrees not long after the sun — a distant orange ball — had passed beyond misty western clouds. The longest night of the year is upon us.
The wind swirled oak leaves lighted only by truck headlights, swirled in circles creating a doorway into other places, places framed by the big old oaks which grow strangely close to the gravel here on the old mountain farm roads. My mind wandered to other places — dark woods from half-remembered travels, will-o-the-wisp lights in the gloom, and gaunt, bleak iron bridges leading to small working towns with little future left.
The wind only intensified and those dark spaces continued to haunt my mind, even beneath the bright lights of the gas station not even a dozen miles away. Inside waited a bored clerk and cases of donuts and hard lemonade and an over-warm men’s room where I could place my hands beneath hot water. I had not dressed for the cold, nor had I dressed for the sudden atmosphere piercing my soul. I turned up my collar, weirdly exhilarated by the turn of the year.
The holiday season is replete with cheer — and also the demand for cheer, real or not. I retreat now to the small place I call home, and it is beginning to feel like home in some small way. My Christmas tree, a Frasier fir, is lit with colored lights — not the stark and classy all-white that I used to use — and most of my ornaments hold some sense of nostalgia. I like to keep the lights low this time of year, candles lit before the coming solstice, reminders that we are not exempt from the celestial tides of the night, even in our bright and brightly lit ignorance.
There’s something very dark in the wrong kind of cheer: “Jesus died for us all so you better straighten up and be happy, or else.” Misguided memories abound. False happiness is not a good goal under the best of times.
One of the great promises to the apostles of Christ was suffering, not riches. We are not promised an easy life — and more often than not, the path of ease and riches is that of the prince of the world, not that of a suffering Christ. In the bright lights of the fake, the modern, the artifice, the demand, there is little room, little patience for suffering. In our constant push for better, we can lose our compassion, our empathy, our soul. In the bright lights we fear the darkness for it is there we could open the door to our own suffering and that may be just what — in the deepest core of our being — we know we need.
Sometimes real humanity is found on a bar stool and not in an uppity church pew and that’s an uncomfortable truth, the truth that we are uncomfortable with our own interior darkness, and often very, very afraid of our own shadows.
The longest night of the year — the winter solstice — is a daunting thing, now overlooked by modern electrically lit homes and late-night big stores. We may think we have conquered the night but it’s an illusion, and in that illusion we grow callous, even — perhaps especially — during this, the happiest time of the year.
This season is not meant for bright callousness, but for introspection, for an inward journey of the deep, and — we hope — genuine care for ourselves and those around us. There is indeed magic here in these December nights, long and quiet and cold, with candles lit against the dark. There are indeed moments of hope but such moments are not grandiose nor materialistic. Jesus himself was nailed to a cross in part because the grand hope of a heaven-sent political liberation against the Empire was not to be.
There is small salvation — and light in the darkness — to the prayer unanswered for we are but small souls flickering in eternity. But there is solace in a barnyard savior, a babe in the manger, even as a guiding star lit the way for magic kings who read the night skies. There is solace in that little light in the manger, hope for the world in a tiny, defenseless babe, and hope in moments seemingly insignificant.
These are the moments we are too ready to overlook, too impatient to notice, too simple to count in our increasingly complex social-media-ready world. The kids won’t be perfect, the gift list incomplete, the stores packed, the roads full of traffic. But in between the big and bright and crazy will be the moments we most want to ignore because they remind us of the truth — time is fleeting and all too soon we will look back and wish we could return to this simpler time, again, once upon a Christmas.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
© StateoftheOzarks 2025
