Christmas gifts in Iowa

Christmas grabs you by the heart and tugs like a kite at the end of the line. Air tastes fresh and sweet as candy canes. The child delights in the dreams and the elder remembers the dreaming days when the future hung out farther than the horizon, fresh with hope. Snow dusts the grasses that rise from the soil while a lone crow squawks from the top of a tree lit against the setting sun.

“Merry Christmas!” your neighbor yells. The mail truck drives by with madness tucked into his cube, filled with green, gold, red and silver, all glimmering packages topped by bows, wrapped by those who love us. The news of the world, if only for that week, is concentrated on love and giving, cherished truths about the meanings no one can mistake. The believer and the skeptic share the spirit despite one holding it in their heart and the other analyzing salvation and redemption.

The work places of office, factory, field, garage and clinic and classroom refer to compassion and the research cites relationship and friends, families simply speak their truth that love is real and makes a difference. Happy hearts share the gift. Meanings overcome the cynics. People live longer in the moment.

The housed and the homeless see the change, offer each other the gifts of empathy and each knows that the other needs, too. The dour and the desperate cannot stifle the power of joy born in love. Here in Iowa we celebrate what a two thousand year old harvest has wrought. Who made you believe but the parcel of a time that set under a tree, something from someone when you were little who shared the love of life.

The downcast may compare the excitement of touching, saying of older days remembered that it is a foreign land since the communities of the internet turned grandpa’s smile into a pastiche on a laptop. Yet a word, a hug, eyes meeting, a festive celebration with loved ones laughing and coughing and crying and remembering still, these cannot be diminished. The old songs are unwrapped and none ask if Santa is coming because he is. At the shelters and in the war zones gifts are shared because the believers refuse to let this love go.

None trouble themselves with the news of the world because a psalm and a proverb tug upon the heartstrings, yes, there is more, more to come than politics or maneuverings, more than speeches are in the visions of the Magi, and something more important than us exists in the starry night.

We can feel the rhythm of the chestnuts roasting though they are gone, and the joy of dreaming about pure means and right ends. We can live in the present and recall the sacrifices and the sleighs, the people who mattered and those who will be born to our hope. The person with a dollar gives it away to the person with a dollar who passes that to another. And that is the gift that can never be forgotten, this time when we give more than we have because it was given to us.

Tim Trenkle lives in Dubuque and has worked as teacher in the Iowa community college system and is a counselor at the rescue mission in Dubuque.