Christmas Optimist, Pessimist, Idealist, or Realist?

We idolize the holidays, believing this special season changes the entire world and everything and everyone in it. Like Chuck Griswold, we become overly optimistic, believing in the ideal of the perfect family Christmas. Life is built on the imperfect, and we are usually greatly disappointed for one reason or another when our expectations are too high or unrealistic. Then we become pessimists at best and Scrooges at worst. I suggest something else - a true Optimist. An idealist who recognizes and acknowledges flaws, but chooses to focus on what is right, rather than what is wrong.

In the well known story, two boys were placed in separate rooms. One filled with every imaginable toy, the other with manure. After an hour observers went to each room to see the boys' reactions. Sure enough, the Pessimist could only complain. Nothing was right. Every toy had a flaw or defect. Noting this, the observers moved to the next room. To their amazement the Optimist was busy digging in the manure. They asked him what he was doing. His answer, "With this much manure, there has to be a horse in here somewhere!"

This holiday season will not be Courier and Ives perfect, not with family scattered across several states and cities and the usual dynamics causing conflicts and misunderstandings, or other concerns trying to push their way in to spoil it. It will be somewhere between A Christmas Story and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, and with a little effort some What A Wonderful Life mixed in, filled with more blessings than I can count. 

I will go one step further. Those visitors on that first Christmas could have chosen to see only a poor family and a cold, dirty stable, but instead they saw the glory of God and the Salvation of Man, Emanuel - God With Us. 

Merry Christmas. May your holidays be blessed with love and joy in whatever form they take.