Christmas memories

Monday, 12/4/17

We are in the first of four weeks of Advent, a time when we prepare for the Lord's coming. People at Mass would like like all our readings to be about Christ coming at Christmas, but the Church disappoints us with readings about Christ coming at our of death, or at the end of the world.

To please ourselves, let us s dredge up two or more of our best Christmas memories.. One of my two choice Christmas memories is  of one of my married sisters coming into our house, dressed in red and blue woolens.

 My sister had all it takes to be a fine mother, but after seven years,  she had remained childless. That Christmas Eve, standing next to my mother's piano, and clappiing her hands, she said, "We're going to have a baby. we're going to have a baby."

My other fine Christmas memory is of a terribly cold midnight Mass in Korea. We had tubs of coals. giving off more smoke than heat. But before Mass, we had ninety adults to be baptized. We had them standing in two lines from the back door to the altar. .

I was going up the lines, putting chrism on the foreheads of the people getting baptized. One old lady, frozen with the cold, went over backward when I anointed her forehead; and although they should'n't have, the people picking her up, found it  funny.