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The Very Best Christmas Present
by Jim Razzi

One snowy morning, a few weeks before Christmas, Mr. Floogle's doorbell rang. It was the mail carrier. He had a big orange cat in his arms. "Is this your cat?" asked the mail carrier."I found it in your mailbox." "No," said Mr. Floogle," I live alone. And, furthermore, I don't like cats." "Meow," said the cat, looking cold and sad. "I can't keep it," said the mail carrier. "Oh, bother ," said Mr. Floogle. Then he looked at the cat. "Meow," said the cat, looking back with big yellow eyes. "Well, I guess I can keep it for today," said Mr. Floogle, "but tomorrow it must go."

Mr. Floogle took the cat in and gave it a saucer of milk. Then he went about his chores. "Meow," said the cat as Mr. Floogle washed the dishes. "It's no use trying to talk to me," said Mr. Floogle. "I don't like cats." So the cat kept quiet and just watched. Mr. Floogle whistled while he washed the dishes. "That's funny," he said to himself," I haven't whistled in years." The day passed, and it was time to go to bed. The cat curled up beside Mr. Floogle and said "Meow ." "It's no use trying to talk to me,"said Mr. Floogle. "I don't like cats." So the cat just lay there, purring gently. The purring put Mr. Floogle to sleep as soon as he closed his eyes.

The next morning Mr. Floogle took the cat out in his car and drove to a dairy farm nearby. "This is where I will leave you. You'll like it here," Mr. Floogle said. "I just don't like cats," Mr. Floogle said to himself as he drove away. Mr. Floogle went to bed that night and said, That's that!"

But the next morning, very early, the doorbell rang. It was the dairy farmer. He had a big orange cat in his arms. "Is this your cat?" asked the dairy farmer. "I found it in one of my empty milk cans." "No," said Mr. Floogle, who was surprised to see the cat again. "I don't like cats." "Meow," said the cat, looking hopeful. "I can't keep it," said the dairy farmer. "Oh, bother," said Mr. Floogle. Then he looked at the cat. The cat looked back and purred. "Well, I suppose I can keep it for today," said Mr. Floogle with a sigh, "but tomorrow it must go."

Just then someone rang his doorbell. He ran down to answer it. It was Santa Claus! He had a big orange cat in his arms. "Is this your cat?" asked Santa. "I found it hiding in my sled at the North Pole." Mr. Floogle had been so used to saying no that he almost said it again. But suddenly he cried, "Yes! yes! It is my cat!" "Meow," said the cat. "I'm glad you're back, too," said Mr. Floogle, stroking the cat's soft fur. Then Mr. Floogle turned to Santa. "But how did you know it was my cat?" he asked. Instead of answering, Santa just gave Mr. Floogle a wink and a nod and hopped into his sled. Mr. Floogle waved good-bye as Santa's sled disappeared over the treetops. "Meow," said the cat. "I missed you, too," said Mr. Floogle. "Meow," said the cat. "Merry Christmas to you, too," answered Mr. Floogle as he gave his cat a big hug. "You're the best Christmas present I could ever get."

Reprinted from FromThe Heart Postcards.com

A Holiday Prayer

What will I call you today ...
Allah, Yahweh, Dios, Apollo, Indra, Holy Ghost?
What languages are you speaking today?

It is said that you are Creator and Linguist of all planets.
You speak Mandarin, Nahuatl, Sanskrit, Pharsi,
Latin, Arabic, and all 300 dialects in India.
For every culture--- a sacred language,
To speak ceremonies, formulas,
prayers to invoke you.

Certainly the Lord of the Universe is just as sacred
in Arabic as in English.
If we believe in your omnipresence,
Why can't we accept that the You is You, in everything,
Everywhere, in all times---with Moses, and Mohammed.

Surely you would have contacted someone in North America.
Why not Black Elk or Mormon Joseph Smith?
We say you are all-powerful, and yet,
We can't accept your sending a messenger
to any culture but our own.

In our superiority, we reject pantheists as primitive,
Those who feel your presence in the stars and oceans.
The Native American rites were so innately spiritual,
Honoring your presence in every blade of grass,
Yet we called them "pagan".

Can't we all be part of "the Grand Old Religion,"
"The Chosen Few," or "the One True Church" in this larger sense?
After all, our entire planet spins out from your finger.
Did you set the world in motion with one spark of astral fusion?
The big bang vibrates still as we blast through space.

Are we not linked tightly enough in our DNA
to be woven together as a blanket,
A sacred garment around the earth---
Parishes, conclaves, synagogues, minarets,
chuppas, stuppas, Eucharist, Kabah, Torah,
Calvary, Mount Ararat, Mount Sinai,
the Mound of the Rock, Mount Merou,
All the holy mountains of the earth?

We breathe in, "Inspirer",
to pull in YOU, Espiritu,
to inspire ourselves with this cosmic energy,
Chi, prana, mana, this You.
Einstein says we are 98% empty space filled with
bubbles of energy. We can feel this energy is You.

So we reach out to thank you for having touched
All our cultures in such personal ways through time,
making each group feel like your special favorites.
We thank you for allowing us to know your names.

Author Unknown

Reprinted from the editor's personal email

The Meaning of The Christmas Myths

It is a beautiful time of the year. The celebration is in full swing. The symbols, some sacred, some quite secular, mingle in the market place: Bethlehem and the North Pole, the Angel Gabriel and Rudolf, the Heavenly Host and Santa's reindeer, crèche scenes and Christmas trees. It is also a season in which light hurls back the darkness of the winter solstice. Christmas captures our imaginations as few things ever do. Unfortunately the religious minds of our generation believe that these traditions can be protected from erosion only if they are literalized. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The deepest meaning of this season can never really be understood until literal claims have been laid aside. Jesus' birth was not something that occurred on a silent and holy night in the little town of Bethlehem. No star announced his birth and no angels sang of peace on earth. These mythical details rather embody a beautiful and eternal human dream that we enter symbolically year after year. Let me briefly analyze the data.

Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus was a late developing part of the Jesus story that did not appear until the writing of the Gospel of Matthew in the 9th decade of the Christian era, when people began to claim that since Jesus was the anticipated messiah, he had to be the heir to the 'throne of David.' That idea carried with it the assumption that this future leader had to be born in the "City of David." The early Christians found scriptural authority for this claim in the prophet Micah, an 8th century BCE figure, who had written "But you O Bethlehem, who are little to be among the clans of Judah, but from you shall come forth from me one who is to be the ruler of Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days."

Matthew had the scribes of Herod quote this text to the Wise Men as he directed them to Bethlehem. So important to Matthew was Jesus' royal lineage that he opened his gospel with a long genealogy, that we call the 'who begat whom' chapter, to document this claim. So Matthew tells his readers that Mary and Joseph actually lived permanently in a house in Bethlehem. It was such a specific house that a star could stop and shine directly on it to guide the wise men to their destination. It was a house that Matthew says they had to abandon when informed in a dream that their child was at risk from King Herod, who like the Pharaoh of old, was destroying Jewish male babies in an attempt to wipe out the promised deliverer. It was a house to which this family could return from Egypt when they heard that Herod had died. It was a house they abandoned once again when they learned that Herod's brother, who was equally dangerous, was now on the throne. This time they fled to Galilee and that, Matthew implies, is how Jesus just happened to grow up in Nazareth and why he became known as a Galilean and a Nazarene. Matthew's myth of Jesus' birth presents him as a new Moses, so that as God once led the chosen people out of Egypt, so God could now lead the chosen messiah out of Egypt. This narrative so clearly serves Matthew's apologetic purpose that it cannot be confused with history. The overwhelming probability is that Jesus was born in Nazareth, which is the clear assumption in Mark, the earliest gospel. Matthew, who had Mark before him when he wrote, is the one who altered the tradition.

Luke, writing near the end of the 9th decade or perhaps even early in the 10th decade (88-93 CE), treated the developing Bethlehem tradition quite differently. Like Mark, Luke is quite clear that Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth. However, he too must address the growing idea that Jesus, as messiah, is the heir to the Royal line of David. So Luke seeks to temper his story of Jesus' Nazareth origins (which were becoming too humble a place of birth for so great a person) to accommodate the Bethlehem tradition. His literary device for doing this was a census that he dates by saying it was ordered by Caesar Augustus when Quirinius was governor of Syria. This census, by which "all the world was to be enrolled," required, according to Luke, that every male person must return to his ancestral home to be registered. This meant, said Luke, that Joseph had to go to Bethlehem, a 94-mile journey from Nazareth, for he was of the house of David. So Joseph just happened to be in Bethlehem when his wife delivered her first-born child. Through this accident of history, Luke argues, the scriptures were fulfilled in Jesus. It was a very ingenious solution indeed since it enabled Luke to combine Jesus' obvious Nazareth origins with the fantasies building around Jesus, proclaiming him the Messiah born in the city of David.

The most preliminary study will reveal, however, that the story is not history. Luke and Matthew, for example, both say that Herod was king at the time of the birth of Jesus. Since secular records reveal that Herod died in 4 BCE, this means that Jesus had to be born before this date. Luke then says that the enrollment, ordered by Caesar, came when Quirinius was governor of Syria. Secular records, however, reveal that Quirinius became governor of Syria in 6-7 CE, by which time Jesus would have been at least 10-11 years old. History begins to wobble visibly.

Luke's theory required that this worldwide enrollment had to occur in the male person's ancestral home. This was the strangest literary wrinkle of all and would have required a massive dislocating migration. David, who had 300 wives, died about the year 960 BCE. Luke was asserting that all of the descendents of King David, whose number some 960 years later must have been legion, not only had to know this ancestral detail about themselves but they also had to make their way back to Bethlehem. This was a time in which human longevity made three generations a century normative, so we are talking about 27-30 generations of keeping family lines alive. To my knowledge no one, in that time when there were no birth or death certificates, to say nothing of marriage licenses, was that deeply into ancestor worship. It is also of interest that the genealogies of Jesus in both Matthew and Luke do not agree in almost any detail, including which of King David's sons constituted the royal line: it was Solomon says Matthew, Nathan says Luke. No one knows who Nathan is but if a man had as many wives as David, certainly one of his sons might have been called Nathan, or anything else for that matter. These genealogies also disagree on who Jesus' grandfather was: Jacob, says Matthew, Heli, says Luke.

A final note that makes Luke's story clearly not history is that on this journey to Bethlehem Joseph was said to have taken his wife, who was "great with child." Why? To be enrolled? Women were not counted in a census, or registered for tax purposes. Women also did not normally travel. Given the mode of transportation available in that day, walking or riding a donkey, what man in his right mind would take an eight months plus pregnant woman on a 94 mile walk or donkey ride, that would normally take seven to ten days and in a world with no restaurants or hotels? One woman biblical scholar, on reading this observed, "Only a man who had never had a baby could have written such a story." No, the Bethlehem birthplace of Jesus is not history. It is part of the later developing mythology that gathered around the origins of Jesus. A person as significant as Jesus was believed to be when these later gospels were written could not have had an ordinary birth; so Matthew and Luke, 50 to 60 years after the crucifixion, freed their imaginations and created these miraculous tales that form our Christmas stories.

Once the mythical content of the Bethlehem birthplace is established, all the other details of these birth narratives fall as literal history. Ancient astrologers did not follow a star announcing the birth of a Jewish king, especially one that no one recognized as a king until well after his death. Recall that Matthew says later that this king was also a carpenter's son. Nor do angels sing to hillside shepherds, propelling them on a similar journey to search for a baby. Luke gives the shepherds only two clues. The baby would be wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. We do both the Bible and human scholarship a grave disservice when we try to literalize and make history out of these interpretative myths, created by the second or third generation of those who were the disciples of this Jesus. No reputable biblical scholar in the world today, Catholic or Protestant, treats these narratives of Matthew and Luke as history. It is time the church said that publicly.

Why do we then keep these stories and repeat them every year if they are not factually true? That is usually the question of an adult who has had his or her fairy tale religion shaken. The answer is simple. Truth is so much bigger than literalism. The meaning of Santa Claus, who receives his greatest joy by giving gifts to children, is not dependent on there being a literal fat elf dressed in red who lives in a place to which we can never go. Some human experiences are so large, so real, so life changing and so defining that the words used to describe those moments must break open the imagination if they are to capture this kind of truth. That is what myth does. That is what the biblical stories of Jesus' birth are all about. There was something present in this Jesus, they said, that opened human lives to new dimensions of reality. Human beings could never have produced what we have experienced in Jesus. In him, they exclaimed, we believe that we have met eternity breaking into time, transcendence entering the mundane, the divine in the life of the human. If that is our experience with the adult Jesus, then his birth must have been marked with heavenly signs that drew people to him.

That is what these stories are trying to say. Our task is not to master the details or to pretend that myths are history. It is rather to enter the experience that caused the myths surrounding his birth to be born, to be transformed by that life and to become a new creation through that experience. If that occurs, these early Christians were saying, we too will see the star of Bethlehem, hear angels sing, and like the wise men and shepherds of old, begin our journey toward the mystery and wonder of God. Bethlehem, the symbolic town where God and human life come together, is finally our human destiny. That is the meaning of Christmas.

John Shelby Spong

Reprinted from A New Christianity For A New World

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The Legend of The Cat

At midnight's stroke,
On the first Christmas, half the world awoke.
Then out of nest and lair
Came thronging to Bethlehem the wordless folk;
Hurried the beasts of the forest, the birds of the air,
To pay the Lord their homage and His due.

And Cat came, too,
Mincing on delicate feet to see the Child.
But being shy and wild,
Approached no nearer than the hearth; lay dumb
And distant there.
While the rest knelt in praise,
The Cat by too much glory overcome
Could not withdraw her gaze
From the Nativity; could only stare
Through slitted eyes as things of fur and feather
(The deer beside the lion, the pheasant, the hare
Safe in the fox's paws) bent down together.
Although their anthems lifted all around,
She, in her throat, made only a trembling sound
And could not bow her head.

Yet as the morning dawned
And one by one the other creatures fled
Each to his habitat-- The eagle to his crag and to his pond
The otter--only Cat
Remained beside the dying fire, unable
To quit the place that was both Crib and Stable.

Then Mary spoke aloud.
"Dear Cat," she said, "dear, stiff-necked, proud
And obstinate beast, I bless you. From this hour
Leave wilderness behind you.
Because you stayed, though none shall have the power
To call you servant, yet the hearth shall bind you
Forever to itself. Both fond and free,
Wherever Man is, you shall also be.
And many a family
Will smile to hear you singing (where you settle)
Household hosannahs like a pulsing kettle."

Some winter night
Observe Cat now. Her eyes will suddenly gleam
Yellow against the light,
Her body shudder in a jungle dream,
Her claws unsheath their sharpness. She remembers
Old times, old barbarous customs, old Decembers
Before she called the tribes of Man her friends.
But the dream ends.
Then, reassured, she curls herself along
The floor and hums her cool, domestic song.

Author Unknown

Puss' Christmas Story
by Wayne Pond

It had been almost a year now since Puss and his family had come to the North Pole to live with Santa.  Oh my, it had been a wonderful year.  But lately Puss had felt an odd sense of discontent, a kind of sense that something was missing.  He climbed to his favorite place at the top of the reindeer barn and sat to ponder.  All around him he could see the busy preparations for the big day; elves bustling around finishing up all the toys, reindeer practicing their takeoffs and landings, everybody busy with something.  Then the problem became crystal clear.

Just then his friend Rudolph came swooping past on a practice flight.  Rudolph stopped and floated in mid-air (Santa's reindeer can do that y'know).  "Why Puss, you look so sad, it's almost Christmas and you should be excited as the rest of us", said Rudolph, "whatever is wrong my friend?"  "Well", replied Puss, "I just realized that everyone here has a job to do except me.  I'm just a useless kitten here."  "Omy", said Rudolph, "this sounds like something you need to talk to Santa about.  Hop on my back and we'll go see him right now."  So off they went to Santa's office where they found him going through some last minute letters.

"Santa", said Rudoph, "Puss here has a problem that I think you should hear about."  "Well certainly", smiled Santa, "sit right here on my desk and tell me all about it.  I always have time for my friends."  So Puss told Santa all about his need.  "Please Santa", he finished, "isn't there a kitten-sized job I can do, just so I'll feel a part of things?"

Santa laid his finger alongside his nose and nodded thoughtfully.  "Hmmmm… this will take a bit of thought.  I'll need a cup of tea, so sit right here while I fetch one and we'll see what we can do."  He gave Puss a wink and a smile and went off to the kitchen.

Puss sat on the desk and waited.  As he sat his eyes dropped to an open letter.  "Dear Santa," it read, "all I want for Christmas is a kitten all my own, signed Amy."  Puss stared at the letter for a moment and then his eyes lit up with glee.  "Santa, Santa... come see.  I think I know what I can do."  He was dancing with excitement.  " There are lots of kittens out there who would love to have a home with children like Amy, could I perhaps find a way to bring them together, please, oh please???"

Santa smiled and said, "well that's a fine thought, why don't you and Rudolph work it out."  Puss and Rudolph spent the rest of the night planning and thinking and arrived back at the office bright and early the next morning.  "We think we got it Santa", said Puss, "with your permission, Rudolph and I can locate the kittens and if we can use a tiny bit of your magic we can lead the children and their parents to them."  Santa laughed so hard his beard wiggled.  "Perfect my friends, perfect", he chuckled, "and you can start immediately."  He equipped them with a BIG bag of Magic Santa Dust and with Puss securely nestled between Rudolph's antlers off they flew.  On each kitten and every family they found they sprinkled a pinch of Santa Dust and it drew them together like a magnet. 

So if you find a Christmas kitten this year, you can be sure that Puss and Rudolph have been around.  And Puss feels a VERY important part of Christmas now.
 
 

©12-19-2002
by Wayne Pond

Reprinted from Kittyfoot.Freeservers.com