(The Holy Family is Homeless)

Maybe I've never gone. Or maybe I've never come back. Going home for the holidays is a strange foreign idiom in my mind not quite tied to somewhere as a specific point on the map. Holiday is like a person, growing, moving, a song in the heart. A feeling to return to. It's that moment of expectancy-- of something about to happen-- that passes. The hall of the soul still heaving, counting the steps fading and advancing into next year, because whatever it was--that Hallowed day--left something.

Left something, that's a strange expression. One to come back to--like an empty nest.

It adequately conveys my understanding of Home for Christmas.

Where do birds rest, when they are not roosting? we may believe that the elaborate straw lair is the feathered friend's home, but no. Nesting, is expressly for the Spring, not as shelter from the cold, but solely for laying eggs and raising the young. At any other time, birds take cover wherever Providence provides.

Much like the saying regarding food, they neither reap nor sow--nor build nor tow-- and yet they are provided for.

Christmas comes to them in the shelf ledge set by a loosened brick in the top corner of the underpass, sheltered from the wind; or in the rotted hollow of the old hickory tree in Geralds' Used Car Lot, or in a dented impression where a rock had been displaced. To huddle and await the next. Earth is their home, wherever they go.

Like for every holy family. There in the dead center, whatever the weather, alone, yet together. Even if dispersed. The Holidays come over-- when they do-- at Home in the heart. Meeting us all where we are, in the given moment. Unjudged, unless judged by us, as being in or out. Like the searing kiss of a snowflake, or of a water drop, running down the skin. Both hot and cold. In fleeting memory.

In memory like on that long journey-- one might say, of coming or going, to where we each came from-- our own Xmas story. As being temporary nests to the Spirit.