Gifts we count on every Christmas

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

It stays the same. That's what I love about Christmas. In a world that is always changing, Christmas doesn't. It may get a bit grander every year, yes, and the season starts a little sooner. But the hymns and the colors and the lights and the gift giving, the baby in the manger, Santa at the North Pole - the crazy, religious, secular mix that is this holy day/holiday hasn't changed in my lifetime. "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" and "Here Comes Santa Claus" I sang as a kid and I'm singing now.

I love 24-hour nonstop Christmas songs on the radio. I love Perry Como's "There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays" but I like "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer," too. I love the red-ribboned wreaths on all the doors, and ribbon candy, the thin kind, and the Salvation Army people ringing their bells and all the Santas at all the malls and the Advent candle at church and the Christmas pageant and the priest trying to explain once again how God became man.

The manger and the tree. They share this holiday. "The Christmas Story" as told by the apostles and "A Christmas Story" written by Jean Shepherd. The shepherds and Mr. Shepherd. There's room for both. Because this is what Christmas is about - God and man and infinite possibility.

My father used to drill holes in our Christmas tree, then fill the holes with leftover branches, because Christmas trees, when I was a child, were skinny, scraggly things.

When he was finished, the tree was still skinny. But then he strung lights - red, orange, blue, green and white - great, big bulbs - and then my mother and I hung the ornaments and then the three of us draped each branch with tinsel. It was never a "House Beautiful" creation. But every one of those funny-looking makeshift trees looked beautiful to me.

Now we buy perfect tree farm trees or fake trees and string them with tiny clear lights and use no tinsel at all.

But the effect is the same. We stand back and look and say, "It's perfect." Because every year, no matter how the tree looks, it is.

Every year I unwrap Christmas ornaments and it's as if I am new to this planet doing this for the first time. Because I am always surprised by what I find, though I've been finding some of the same things for decades.

But I forget until I hold a pale blue glass ball in my hand that I still have this, that it didn't get broken, that it's still here. I forget that I have so many of my mother's things. Flawed and old and cherished, they make me remember and smile.

And this is the same, too. Last year, 10 years ago, 30 years ago, unwrapping things, remembering and smiling.

The Enchanted Village is gone but the enchantment isn't. It has simply moved to the streets around us. My father used to drive my friends and me to Blue Hill Cemetery in Braintree to look at the Christmas lights at the entrance because there was nothing like it anywhere. Now there are lavish decorations and lights everywhere.

Milk and cookies for Santa. Mistletoe. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. Frosty. Bah, humbug! Children lining up to see Santa. Children dressed as angels singing "Silent Night."

These are the traditions of Christmas.

And these are the eternals: We tell the same stories, "And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger."

And we sing the same songs, "Away in a manger, no crib for a bed." And we read the same books, "'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house ..."

We celebrate the same way, year after year after year.

We tell new stories, too. But we keep the old. It's why Christmas stays the same. And why a little bit of us stays the same, too, why we grow up but never give up the possibilities that Christmas brings.