Cinnaman

To The Amazing Christmas People: Thank You

It was Christmas week when Anna Tranausky was dying, under 24-hour care in the Philadelphia Protestant Home, and the Christmas People were much in sight.

There were all shapes, sizes and colors and they had different titles – nurse, nurse’s aide, maintenance person. But they all carried, to a person, that special inner something that relates to human beings in trouble or pain. A squeeze of your arm. A sympathetic smile while they are emptying a waste basket. A whispered report on Anna’s condition.

Christmas People are around us all year, but they are more noticeable this season. If anyone deserved them around on that Christmas six years ago, it was Anna, now in her 80s and ravaged by Alzheimer’s. Anna had her own specialness and knew something about sacrifice – giving up to God her favorite sweets for months at a time to pray for a child in pain, making Mass every day for someone else’s intention, cleaning the altar at Church.

When the time came, on New Year’s Eve, the Christmas People had multiplied. The funeral home man who showed up looked my wife in the eye and begged her to call him with any need at all. Any way he could help. In such settings, insincerity is easily detected. There were none in his heartfelt connection.

There is a Spirit of Christmas. When the family is joking around the dinner table, or seated around the tree for gifts, or sitting in a pew, the moment and the mind stand still for a few seconds and the soul drinks in an indescribable peace. There are other such seasons in life, spontaneous flashes of insight and joy, but Christmas probably holds the record.

The Christmas People, however, light that candle all year long. You know them. Sometimes it is their job – the nurses at Children’s Hospital, the ambulance drivers everywhere, the Crisis Center workers. They take jobs like this because they do the unexpected, the small and large extra steps. A look, a word -- something takes them beyond the job. And sometimes we notice. (“Oh God, the nurses were so good.”)

In a cubicle in Burlington County Community College, a woman named Barbara Ericcson works with young people who struggle to do their college work while they also are dealing chronic and acute illness. She put a hand on their shoulder and lowers her voice to offer encouragement and advice, stories of others who have made it. A Christmas Person.

Sometimes you recognize them, but not always. You know of that special person who has spent months or years caring for an incapacitated family member, denying themselves, forgoing vacations, social nights, spending hard-to-come-by money on the comfort of their loved one.

In a small row house in the Juniata section of Philadelphia, a cousin swept away furniture from the tiny dining room and managed to fit in the hospital bed for her mother, then arranged for family members and friends to be there during the workday. Days, weeks, months went by and the little room became a warm place to visit and recall the good days, the memories. Because of this extraordinary effort, her mother died in peace. In her home. Thanks to Carol Welsh. One of the Christmas People.

No one could list them all. But at this time of the year, it is good to spend a few minutes to remember them. Make contact with those you know. But others are near strangers you do not know by name or phone number, so you can only recall their presence and their gift.

If you’ve been so touched and still doubt the existence of Intelligent Design, perhaps you can ponder the amazing combination of accidents, the wacky chain of chance that made this all come about.

But for most of us who have seen and felt the power of those Christmas People, who have known their gentleness and care season after season, year after year, we can only thank God. And try in our own feeble way to sing their song to others.

posted by Lou Antosh @ 11:21 AM