25 Days of Drinkin'

I generally consider myself a fairly terrible gift-giver.  It's not that I give bad gifts necessarily (except for that one Snuggie I bought Alex.  Sorry, Alex), as much as I just don't give any gifts.  For the last several weddings I've been to? I'm somewhat confident I showed up gift-less.  Christmas gifts for my nieces and nephews? Nah.  In fact, I don't give them birthday gifts either.  Friends' birthdays? Um, I typically send cards.  I know, that makes me sound like a total Scrooge. It's not that I'm anti-gifts, as much as I just don't think about it. It's not instinctive for me. (Okay, okay, maybe there is a small part of me that is anti-gifts on occasion.) I'm always amazed by people who are excellent gift-givers.  My mom is one of those people.  My friend Alex is another.  Jill, too.  They'll find things and I'll think, "I don't know that I could have picked out a better gift for me if I had bought it for myself."  When I get really stellar gifts from other people, I always feel like such a slouch because I just don't have a strong track record.  Here's my defense for my poor gift-giving skills, though:

• I hate giving gifts out of obligation or tradition.  I'm not interested in buying gifts for the sake of buying gifts.  Those kind of gifts feel pointless to me.  
• I hate giving meaningless gifts.  If I'm going to give somebody something, I want it to have personal significance, purpose or value, not just some random item.
• I'd rather give the gift of experience rather than the gift of "stuff."  I want to buy time with people and memories, not more useless things to fill their homes and collect dust.

But every once in a blue moon, I go out in a gift-giving blaze of glory.  I get struck by a bolt of brilliance and find the perfect gift.  This happens only about once every three years, but when it does - I am golden.  That surprise 40th birthday party for my friend?  Knocked it out of the park (at least I think I did?) And that miniature replica I had made of my parents' house?  Nailed it.  My mom carted the thing around in her purse for days, showing it off.  And the donkey piñata I mailed to my friend Erica?  One for the ages.  Her and her husband were dressing up as Mary and Joseph for Halloween, so I mailed her a donkey to complete the look.  I nicknamed him Hey-Soos. (Get it? It's the pseudo-phonetic spelling of Jesus.  I know, probably a little sacrilegious, but I thought the whole thing was genius.  You can't have Mary and Joseph without a donkey.  And you really can just slap some postage on a piñata and mail it as-is. No need to put it in a box.)

But those are about the only example of brilliant gifts I can think of in my 33-years of existence, which is either a sad commentary on my memory or a sad commentary on my gift-giving abilities.  For the sake of this conversation, we'll go with the latter.

Since I hadn't had a flash of brilliance in awhile, I was due for one.

It has become a bit of a running joke in my family how my dad frequently stands in front of the refrigerator, doors wide open, looking for something to drink, contemplating the options.  "I don't want pop.  Too much sugar."  "I'm tired of drinking unsweetened tea."  "Water is boring."  He usually closes the doors, quietly lamenting, his thirst still not quenched. [Insert #firstworldproblem.]

I decided to solve his problem.

The week after Thanksgiving, my niece and I set off on an adventure to buy my dad 25 different kinds of drinks, one for each day of December.  We only had to stop at two locations to complete the task: World Market and Giant Eagle.  Who knew the average grocery store and specialty store could boast such a random assortment of drinks.  We basically pulled off the shelves the most off-the-wall options we could spot.  The weirder it sounded, the faster we scooped it up and put in our cart (all non-alcoholic, of course). I bought one bottle of each drink, figuring if one was truly atrocious, he wouldn't have to suffer through an entire 6-pack or 2-liter bottle, and instead just had to finish 8-12 ounces of each.  I arranged them in somewhat of an intentional order, trying to balance carbonated drinks with juice drinks.  On the outside of each of them, I wrapped my own label, sort of a commentary on each selection.  Then, each day, I put the day's bottle in the fridge, front and center.

We kicked it off on December 1 with a drink called "Dandelion Burdock."  My dad was mildly unimpressed.  Day 2 consisted of Blume Honey Water, Blueberry.  Also not a real winner.  Along came Prickly Pear, Ginger Kombucha, Cock'n Bull Ginger Beer, Pomegranate Maple Water, Mamma Chia, Thai Tea, Cucumber Sparkling Soda, Rose Lemonade, Matcha, and Lemon Cayenne Drinking Vinegar.  None of which got a thumbs up, let alone two.

But Days 7, 11 and 19?  Real doozies.  In the words of my father:              
             

Day 7, 1915 Organic Cold-Pressed Apple, Romaine, Cucumber, Spinach, Kale, Lemon Juice = "It's like drinking a bale of hay."  He took one sip of this and then promptly poured it down the drain. (You have to realize something - my dad has a stomach of steel.  So you know it's real bad if even my dad isn't willing to finish drinking it.)

Day 11, Alo Exposed Original + Honey (Aloe Vera Juice Drink) = "This is nasty.  I don't know how anybody drinks this garbage.  I sure don't need bits of aloe floating in my drink."  He may have used a different word for "garbage," but we'll keep it family-friendly.  I think he also poured this one down the drain.  

Day 19, Sparkling Jasmine Essence Water = "I'm pretty sure that's just a straight-up bottle of perfume with some carbonation."  My dad isn't a very demonstrative person, but I would imagine he was feeling like Buddy the Elf on the inside when he drank this one.

Day 21 proved to be the most complicated one to get open.  It actually required directions.  I mean, like multi-step directions with images to go with them.  Hello Kitty Ramune Strawberry soda.  Somehow or another, there's a marble enclosed in the bottle, acting like a stopper, so you can't just tip it back and drink the whole thing, even once you do figure out how to open it.  My dad found it frustrating and a "pain in the ---" to open.

I was striking out so bad on the series of drinks that I texted my dad half-way through and told him he was going to be cured of ever wanting to drink anything other than water ever again.

By the time we got to Christmas Eve and 24 drinks later, we had only three winners.  Three.  That's a 13% success rate.  The only qualification for being a winner was whether my dad would go out and buy it again.  Bolthouse Farms Peach Parfait Breakfast Smoothie, Bolthouse Farms Tropical Goodness, and Bai Costa Rica Clementine made the cut. So, yeah, maybe three out of 24 doesn't make me quite the all-star gift-giver I thought I'd be this year.

But then today, Day 25 came, Christmas Day.  I knew I had this one in the bag.  It was a can't-lose-option.  I wrapped up the bottle and put a note on the outside of it:  "Day 25.  This is it.  The grand finale.  The defining moment.  The sum of all things.  The apex of glory.  BEHOLD! The nectar of the gods, and most assuredly a WINNER."

I wrapped it in quite a few layers of wrapping paper, just to keep the suspense going.  I didn't want to make it too easy, after all.  He had made it through 25 days, so what was a few more minutes of fighting his way through some excessive amounts of wrapping paper?

Finally, he unveiled Day 25.  The heavens opened up, beams of sunlight poured down, angels sang.  A divine moment, no doubt.

And what should my dad find buried in the many layers?

Nothing less than a humble, pure, time-tested, classic, loved-by-all, bottle -

Of water.

There was no pouring this one down the drain.

Congratulations, Dad, on drinkin' your way through the holidays. 

You're the real winner of 'em all.

Always Winter, Never Christmas

My mother stood on the porch this morning in her pajamas, no shoes or socks on, taking pictures of the snow that was falling from the heavens, our first snow of the season.  In October.  And you know Christmas has officially arrived according to Hallmark, since today kicks off their "Countdown to Christmas."  A whopping 21 movies premiering between now and New Year's Eve.  My mother has had a countdown to Christmas going since sometime in August, and now she's practically shivering with excitement with all these signs pointing to that magical day of December 25.

I don't know that I'm too far behind her, if I'm being honest.  I'm just a little less demonstrative about it, and wave my "I love Christmas" flag a little less boldly.  I purchased Christy Nockels' Christmas album, The Thrill of Hope, the other day and listened to it on my way to work.  ("Wrap This One Up" is definitely worth a listen.)  Although, I will say I don't necessarily care to have Christmas constantly in my face either.  I don't want to walk into a retail store right now and be bombdarded by all things ornaments, tinsel, Santa and jingle bells.  My mother asked my dad and me if we could put up one (yes, there are multiple - I think we maxed out at 7 trees one year when I was a kid) of the Christmas trees this weekend, and my face must have twisted into some sort of appalled, disgusted look which very firmly conveyed "no" without so much as saying a word.  There's a happy medium to this whole Christmas celebrating thing.  Not too much, too soon.

I discovered the band Relient K has a song called "In Like a Lion (Always Winter)," which is based on one of my very favorite movies, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: 

It's always nice to look out the window
And see those very first few flakes of snow
And later on we can go outside
And create the impression of an angel that just fell from the sky

When February rolls around I'll roll my eyes
Turn a cold shoulder to these even colder skies
And by the fire my heart it heaves a sigh
For the green grass waiting on the other side

It's always winter but never Christmas
It seems this curse just can't be lifted
Yet in the midst of all this ice and snow
Our hearts stay warm cause they are filled with hope

The lyrics speak to a scene in the movie where Mr. Tumnus, one of the creatures in the land of Narnia, explains how a curse has come upon the land since the evil White Witch has taken power.  Narnia is covered in ice and snow, the rivers have frozen over, the flowers have stopped blooming, the trees have lost their leaves, and a perpetual cold has settled on the kingdom.  "Always winter, never Christmas," Tumnus declares.  He's really saying there's a barrenness here in this place, and not just barrenness, but barrennes without hope.  No hope of a thaw, no hope of green things growing again, no hope of a freedom from the weight of the curse.

Always winter, never Christmas.

I realized that's what the 400-plus years of silence must have felt like, the time stretched between the final words of Malachi 4 in the Old Testament and the first words of Matthew 1 in the New Testament. 

Four hundred long, long years of no prophets, no words from on high, no documented miracles.  Nothing.  Silence.  This great gaping void, the threat of a curse looming from Malachi 4:6, the last verse of the Old Testament, standing as the parting words from God before he would seemingly go underground and let a deep winter sweep over humanity, "He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers; or else I will come and strike the land with a curse."    

Always winter, never Christmas. 

But then - but then -

Praise God, but then.

But then there arrives a baby in a manger, a King born in a stable, there among the cattle and the donkeys and the hay and the stench.  "The time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son.  She wrapped him in clothes and placed him in a manger..." (Luke 2:6-7).

Four hundred years of silence broken by the cry of a baby and the shout of angels.  Four hundred years of a seeming barrenness without hope completely wrecked by "a great company of the heavenly host" appearing, "praising God and saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests' " (Luke 2:13-14).

Four hundred years of silence ushered in by a thunderous shout and proclamation of glory. 

Christmas.

Finally.

And not Christmas because it was marked by a day on the calendar, but Christmas because it was marked by a season of waiting met by a season of fulfillment.  Christmas because it was marked by hope - the thrill of hope.  "Our hearts stay warm cause they are filled with hope," as Relient K says.

Jesus came to earth - a baby who grew into a man who became the Savior who went to the cross - and the thaw began.  The thawing of the hearts of men, the thawing of humanity that had been blanketed in cold and ice.  Buds began to appear on the trees yet again, and the people began to shake off the winter clothes wrapped tightly around their hearts.

But it seems winter has returned to our hearts.  We now live stretched between the time of his first coming as a baby and the time of his second coming as divine King.  It seems things have frozen over yet again, and humanity is showing its tendency to harden their hearts with ice, thickened with violence, pride, abuse, unforgiveness, slander, brutality, treachery, conceit, "lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God" (2 Timothy 3:1-5).

Always winter, never Christmas.

And it's in the waiting where we are most prone to lose heart.  To feel like the snow surrounding us is a permanent fixture, and the icicles hanging from our souls will never melt away.        

But then - but then -

Praise God, but then.

But then some day - a day that only God knows about -

The frost of over two thousand years will be broken by the cry of the four the living creatures, and the elders and the saints.  Two thousand-plus years of a seeming barrenness without hope completely wrecked by, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come" (Revelation 4:8).

Two thousand-plus years of seeming silence ushered in by flashes of lightning, rumblings and peals of thunder (Revelation 4:5), and a mighty shout and proclamation of glory.

Christmas.

Finally. 

Finally it will never be winter.

But always Christmas.

Cause when it's always winter but never Christmas
Sometimes it feels like you're not with us
But deep inside our hearts we know
That you are here and we will not lose hope.

You are here, Jesus, and we will not lose hope in the waiting.  We long for when it is always Christmas, never winter.  We will celebrate you even in the cold, even in the barrenness, even in the silence of our world gone mad, all while we wait for the warmth of your Son.