Don't Give Up The Sleigh... Time to reve up and steal ourselves for Christmas. We will get some presents we wanted - thank God, some we don’t want or like, whicj we will accept with a gracious thank you. We will shoot dagger eyes at our children who open a gift in front of the giver and say, “Eww, this isn’t what I wanted!” We will take phone calld from people we must talk to once a year. I personally believe that eggnog was invented specifically for the purpose of getting through those horrible - I have no idea what to say - phone calls. My donation is my annual Christmas column. I hope you like it, revised and embellished to the limit of belief of course... I believe there are people and things and ideas that belong to the world. Mother Theresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Louis Pasteur, Louie Armstrong, all the great minds and artists, are some of the people who belong to the world. The Pyramids, the Statue of Liberty, the Dome of the Rock, the Great Wall of China, the Wailing Wall are some things that belong to the world. The Bagavad-Gita, the Upanishads, the teachings of Buddha, the Torah and Talmud, the New Testament, the Koran and all spiritually enriching ideas belong to the world. Kwanzaa with it’s focus on family, Chanukah with it’s theme of rededication to that which is holy, Christmas with it’s message of hope and peace, all belong to the world. And I believe, Santa Claus, the person and the idea, belongs to the world too. We learn about Santa early. He loves us and brings a present. We grow up a little and eventually figure out the Santa conspiracy. As teens, we denounce our all childhood beliefs, especially Santa. We become “cool” and pretty much know everything by the time we're twenty. It's beyond comprehension to us how our dumb relatives can lead such screwed up lives. We'll never repeat the mistakes of our parents. Through our twenties, we shun our families for our friends and lovers. We don't need Santa, our idiot families, or the whole holiday mishmosh. We are all-knowing, we are powerful, we are so stupid it will later astound us. We spend our thirties correcting all the mistakes we made in our twenties. Most of us are married with children and suddenly we hear our mother's words coming out of our mouths. We worry alot because there is way too much month left at the end of the money. Our forties are great, aside from the fact that body parts start heading south... Now you know you have all of what you need and much of what you want. You realize that money ebbs and flows in life. Money only increases options. Chicken tastes the same whether it's served on a paper plate or a golden one. And money doesn't insulate anyone from pain, loneliness or despair. Possessions become just “things”, and things come and go. What's really important is time. The days are longer and the years are shorter. You can never have one minute of your life back, ever. Suddenly, there's not always a "next time". You might as well do what you like while it’s still legal. Old dreams come off the shelf. You make the time to restore the car. Time to drink the good wine and eat off the fine china. You let go of grudges because while you’re holding a grudge, they’re out dancing... You finally realize that own opinion is what matters most. Is it really going to matter what someone else thought of anything you did in a hundred years? Nope. You've matured enough to know that you're not better than anyone else, but damn if you ain't just as good. You rediscover your very own still amusing, still annoying, family. My grandfather had a pair of tweezers he hung on a tiny nail in his shaving cabinet. All the girls used it to tweeze eyebrows. One Christmas Eve, he pitched one of his famous fits about the tweezers, which were missing again, and he didn’t let up all evening until we left for midnight Mass. That Christmas, we all gave him tweezers as joke. He got eight pairs of tweezers that year. Santa has made a dramatic comeback in your life by now, and he’s even grander than you remembered. He doesn't dye his hair. Married to a woman who’s the same age he is. He's fat and wears red, so you can’t miss him. You find you need Santa more as an adult than you ever did as a child. You've seen enough tragedy and not enough miracles. But Santa is an annual miracle you can depend on. Santa lets us pause and reconnect with all our Christmas' past. As soon as we hear Bing Crosby sing "White Christmas", we hear the sound of our own back door, the smell of our own pillow, echoes of our parent's voices. We’d give anything to be six years old once more and bound down the stairs on Christmas morning and see our disheveled parents in rumpled robes sitting on the couch, watching us through a flurry of flying ribbons and paper. Nothing you need now can be brought down a chimney in a sack. Still, it’s alright somehow. You know you’re all grown up when you no longer need Santa's presents, but God above, how you still need his presence...Happy Holidays to you! And God Bless us, everyone !