Couldn’t I take ‘em all at once, and have it over, Jacob?
So Ebenezer Scrooge entreats the ghost of Jacob Marley when old Scrooge hears the news that he will be haunted by 3 ghosts in the course of the evening. Although the plea fell upon deaf ears, the triple haunting resulted in Scrooge’s redemption.
Do ghosts haunt you at Christmas? They certainly do me. Because all of my "upstream" blood relatives have passed on, I tend to get re-acquainted with their ghosts around Christmas time each year, when I see and hear them celebrating Christmases long gone in snippets of videos stored somewhere in my gray matter. And of course I am there in those videos as well, wearing a younger man’s clothes.
In a sense, Christmas is the greatest ghost story, for it speaks to the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us physically for a time, the Ultimate Reverse Haunting, God the Father through the Holy Ghost becoming a physical person with the objective of saving us all. Certainly, it is to humanity’s credit combined with divine grace that He chose to become a human being when He easily could have become something else - or taken His business elsewhere.
After Christmas, the frequency of my hauntings will decline. The videos of the departed Busks will go back into the appropriate mental compartment, and I will focus on enduring a Western Michigan January, February and March. But as Carly Simon sings, There’s always someone haunting someone…and you know who I am, though I never leave my name or number, I’m stuck inside of you…
My Christmas wish for you is simple. Be receptive to your hauntings; let them be a positive force in your life. The shades of the past can often help us live in the present. And if you meet any really interesting spirits, please send them my way, I have questions!
Thanks for blogging with me thus far, and Happy Xmas.
