Hollow Days: Orphans at Heart

The Christmas season has arrived. And like hornets we will swarm, trying to spend and acquire as if a day of reckoning were due. We try to express a sentiment left so far away, the wanting to belong, to be acceptable. It is as if we are trying to introduce ourselves to the people who already know and like us. Just like an orphan wanting to make a good impression so that someone will take him home.

We have lost the essence of what holidays mean, that reassurance of childhood when we could look at the shining Christmas tree and see its glory and not fret the cost. Childhood - a time when we could make gifts by hand and not be embarrassed at the simplicity, but be so thrilled to give it we could hardly wait until morning.

The holiday should be a remembrance of what we were and an appreciation of what we are. It is not a time to become and to create. Rather, it is a time to hold to what we have and for one day, one time, let it be enough.
- Mary O. Fumento, December 1995