Expecting...

Do you remember when the socially correct way to talk about pregnancy was to say... “she's expecting?” Well, that may have been an attempt to sanitize for children (and other impressionable people) an event that was awkward to talk about. But I think that the language carried something very positive along with it.

Mary of Nazareth was 'expecting' as she traveled to Bethlehem, and as the story goes, soon along side her appeared a supportive husband as well as expectant shepherds, wise men, oxes and asses.

I remember the Christmases of my childhood as being times of great expectancy. There were the letters to Santa, of course, and the Christmas caroling where we carried painstakingly decorated Christmas cookies nested in cupcake papers and packed in tops from emptied greeting card boxes to shut ins and others whose anticipation of the season might have been slightly less than ours. There was skating on the long placid, compliantly frozen river from one town to the next, and sledding down the steep hill at the edge of town until we shushed out onto a vacant Main Street and coasted forever.

Even if the stockings on Christmas morning were meagerly filled, or the presents were modest; even if they got lost in the snow storm of wrapping paper, my expectancy, wrapped in that of family and friends around me prevailed, and made each Christmas better than the one before.

In all of this there was one consistent theme. I approached every facet of the holiday with great anticipation. And!!! All of those around me did the same. We coaxed the season into brilliance, stoked the excitement whenever it might seem to lag, and we did it together. In all of that, I never remember a disappointing Christmas.

Makes me wonder what life would be like if we did that all the time. What if we really expected that our life would measure up to our dreams? What if we were willing to dream at length and in detail, contravening the appearance in our life of situations that didn't live up to the dream? What if we surrounded ourselves with those who were willing to dream with us? What if expectancy saturated us?

Why...maybe we would get what we were expecting...