An Angel Appeared On Christmas

December 26th, 2009 | Author: Greta

PromisedLand The lump of raw gingerbread (See Praying for a Christmas Miracle) was seen to its full potential by an angel who appeared on my doorstop with my phoned-in grocery requests in his hands. This angel was neither a blond, infant cherub, nor John Travolta, nor a Victoria’s Secret model in feathered wings selling underwear. We’ll just call him JAY MASUNAGA, since that’s his name, which means nothing unless you know him, but my point is that angels don’t often resemble the pictures that come up in the Google image search. Sometimes they are 32 years old, 5’6”, slender, dressed in Armani, bearing an impish grin, and attached to a laptop for frequent Farmville updating. Jay is that along with many other adjectives that he doesn’t deserve to hear before his 40^th birthday. The second point is that some of your Facebook friends are actually real friends who can follow through on something other than posting pictures of themselves picking organic vegetables. Many, many thanks to Jay and others like him who haven’t lost the art, like perhaps I have, of helping out ‘just ‘cause,’ and not just to get into heaven. Feeding the homeless will get you into heaven. Helping me make a gingerbread house will not. That is true altruism, ladies and gentlemen. Tell me I’m wrong.

The second Christmas miracle occurred involving the unemployment SNAFU where my marking the wrong box on a question halted my $8000 in back checks being sent to me. You saw that number right. Want to see it again? Here: $8000. I said to my unstoppably optimistic husband, Please tell me something that will make me feel better about this. He tried a few lines out on me, but they all failed. Poor husband. Poor me.

Later, I went to check my previous post for, I don’t know, spelling errors, and noted the line that read:

George, having lost $8000, is ready to jump off the bridge because he doesn’t know that the movie is called It’s A Wonderful Life.

I know it’s tacky to quote one’s self, but if I don’t, no one will, AND it was exactly what I needed to hear. See, in the movie you think, Oh come on, Jimmy Stewart! It’s only money. Mr. Potter is evil, your wife is lovely, your children are adorable and you are WAY too handsome a hero to die over this. I find it oddly coincidental that the amount is the exact same as the loss over which I am lamenting. Perhaps a metaphysical 32-year-old, Farmville-obsessed angel was at work or it is just a weird coincidence, BUT it worked to help me step out of the situation and see that it’s not the end of the world, and that I’m no worse off than a Jimmy Stewart character, which is why we watch movies in the first place. There’s no other good reason to like Jennifer Anniston.

So I’m feeling okay on the blessings front, having experienced two Christmas miracles (or three if you count my old dollhouse LittleDigs that my parents saved, which we gave to our children, which they loved, and which cost us only about $50 in glue and fake landscaping. It is pictured here since it, unlike our home, has a gloriously elegant formal dining room). I am thankful for all this, and for having had a wonderful Christmas. And, of course, for Diet Pepsi.