Some of us primarily mark time by school year, by fiscal or tax years, by growing seasons, and some of us, for a period of time at least, by the weeks of pregnancy ticking by on a calendar.

Regardless, we all keep track of time in some way, and as far as I can tell it seems to be getting the best of us.

I even know somebody who (no joke) begins a countdown to the following year’s Christmas on December 26. And she manages to keep the number in her head all through the year. If you run into her in March or July or October, she knows just how many more days until Christmas.

The truth is, it’s really hard to keep from looking to what’s next. It’s hard to be present in the present!

Think about those times just before periods of transition. I’ve been noting how we mark time differently at those moments. We say, “By this time next month, I’ll be finished with college.” And then, “The next time I take this sweater out of storage, I’ll be married.” And then, “By this time next year, I’ll have saved enough money to…” You get the drill.

I was doing this sort of thing as we packed up our Christmas decorations. I even said to J, “Do you realize that the next time we decorate our Christmas tree, we’ll have a seven-month-old?”

And I really couldn’t imagine what that would be like.

Of course, you never really can imagine what “it” will be like, whatever that “it” is for you, you know.

Packing up these ornaments, especially the glittery neon “E” from preschool, helped me to see that this is going to be an entire year of epiphanies in the ordinary for me. I hope I can take the time to watch out for them, to experience them, and appreciate them.

Because when we get caught looking into the future too much–looking forward to Lent, to Easter, to Pentecost, counting down the days until Christmas or, for that matter, the number of weeks until a baby is born–we can get desensitized to the epiphanies right now, right in the midst of ordinary, everyday life.

It had been less than a year since Gail and I visited with our son, daughter-in-law, and only grandbaby in their home in Washington state. Because we live in Pennsylvania, we try to Skype each week so we can talk to them and see their faces and—most of all—so Myka can get to know her long distance grandparents.

It is always a delight to hear Myka’s sweet voice, “Hi, Grandma. Hi, Grandpa,” when she sees our faces on the screen. It always makes my old grandpa heart go pitty-pat!

In December, a new bundle of joy arrived in the family, baby boy Emery. We planned our next visit in January to spend time with them after Emery was home from the hospital and settled in.

Because our plane arrived late, Myka was in bed when we arrived, and we had to wait until morning to see her. But we held baby Emery and enjoyed the time with his parents.

The next morning I really expected to be greeted by a happy “Hi, Grandpa!” when Myka woke up.

Instead, it was as if she didn’t recognize the real me. She knew the flat image on the computer screen and she knew my voice, but this 3-D, full-size, bearded old man was not what she knew.

Why was that, you ask?

Because no matter how you spin it with adults or kids or the interface in between, social media in any form is a poor substitute for the real thing. Nothing beats being physically in the same room. Inviting someone to be your “friend” or to linked in is fine but it comes nowhere close to inviting them to have dinner with you. Nowhere. (That is another post.)

Sure, it didn’t take long for Myka to warm up to us, and we had a great week. Every time we walked into the room or she came into ours, we heard that sweet sound, “Hi, Grandma. Hi, Grandpa.”

It still melts my heart.

We will continue to Skype with Myka, Emery, and their parents—after all, some contact is better than none—but even more now, I will be wishing Myka was sitting on my lap so I could read her one of her books. Again.

Though I tend to dread taking the ornaments off of the tree, dealing with the silly, stubborn metal hooks, and sliding the puzzle-piece smaller boxes around so that they fit in the big plastic tub we keep the decorations in, the truth is that I always enjoy the process once it’s underway.

Like so many other folks’ Christmas trees, ours is basically held together with memories.

And I’m only being somewhat metaphorical. Seven Christmases ago, we paid a measly fifteen bucks for the cheapest artificial tree we could find, not expecting it to last us past our short tenure in Texas. It’s pretty frail and sparse at this point, but nothing that can’t be patched together with a few memories.

For example, J’s grandmother has handmade him an ornament every year since he was a little boy (and one for me, too, for nearly the last decade). These red-and-green yarn creations squeeze into nearly ever crevice we have available and remind us of the hours of labor and love that went into them.

The year we got married, we were given a set of twelve traditional German ornaments that symbolize the blessings wished upon our new life together. From a teapot to a rabbit to a cornucopia, we’ve been symbolically blessed many times over. At this point, I’m not sure what each of them represents, but I have a guess that the rabbit means fecundity.

My mom decided a few years ago–maybe the year we married, I’m not sure–that she wasn’t going to put up a tree any more, so she boxed up all of my childhood ornaments to pass on. (She has since rescinded and usually puts up her own tree, but I’ve still got the ornaments.) These include popsicle stick creations, a strange metal-netting-and-pipe-cleaner angel, and a neon “E” sprinkled with glitter from 1986.

And she also gave me an entire box of angels.

I’ve written elsewhere about my grandmother’s tradition of giving me an angel ornament every year for Christmas before she passed away from colon cancer, and about J occasionally continuing the tradition. My mom has also taken up the mantle and even this year, more than ten years since Ginny passed, I unwrapped a new angel.

These were my thoughts as we slowly undecorated the tree and packed up the creche last week.

As I took each angel off of the tree, wrapping the fragile ceramic and glass carefully, tossing the metal-and-piper-cleaner one carelessly, I remembered not how important things are, but how important traditions can be in shaping who we are.

How important people are.

How important remembering is.

Somehow I don’t find myself having those sorts of epiphanies when, during the hustle and bustle, we try to tear down the Christmas decorations before New Year’s.

Rather, it’s when we’re patient and deliberate and quiet that even ugly preschool ornaments can present us with epiphanies in the ordinary.

Sometimes we’ve been known to gradually un-decorate, just as we gradually decorate during Advent. We’ll remove the ornaments and the tree, for example, but leave up the greenery and white lights on the mantle, reminding us that during Epiphany, we experience Christ in the world. We bring our gifts, like the magi brought, and we respond to the call of Christ’s light in the world, like the magi did.

This year, we were away for Epiphany. In fact, we didn’t arrive home until nearly a week after. Upon arriving home on the 12th, we moved our magi to their place beside Jesus, pretending they actually arrived while Mary and Joseph were still in Bethlehem, and decided to hold off un-decorating for a few more days.

Okay, so we were really just too busy to take the decorations down, but who’s counting?

Finally, half-way through January, we gave in to the pressure to take down our Christmas tree.

And now I find myself experiencing an interesting in-between time in the Christian liturgical calendar.

Some versions of the calendar have us still living the Epiphany, that season of Christ being revealed to the magi, to Gentiles, to us. Other versions have already bumped us into what is known as Ordinary Time, a time-out of sorts between Epiphany and the fasting season of Lent, a foreshadowing of the weeks upon weeks of Ordinary Time we experience through the summer months.

So what, right?

Well, folks, I want both.

I want to experience the Epiphany as well as little “e” epiphanies in Ordinary Time as well as in little “o” ordinary experiences of the daily. Is that too much to ask?

Um, no.

Over the last few days, their friend and housemate got a stomach bug. A very unpleasant stomach bug.

In the midst of all of this, my sister-in-law reportedly* stated a great truth about community, which I am swiping from Facebook and reprinting here without her permission:

Independence is cleaning up your own puke… Community is cleaning up your roommate’s.

Ah, yes.

And, we could add, community is also having someone to clean up yours.

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* I add an asterisk because she does deny using these exact words, 
though not the sentiment.

In pretty much every church I’ve attended, children’s moments are hit or miss. Some good. Some awful. Mostly awkward. And, as far as I can tell, much of the time they aren’t beneficial to the children, per se, other than to get them out of their seats to burn a bit of energy in the midst of all the adult moments going on.

Erik’s sermonette this week was about geese and whether or not they’re silly (as in, “you silly goose”).

Doesn’t sound very profound does it? Well, I’ve got news for you.

It was.

This is what he pointed out:

1) Geese fly in a V, which helps the geese in the back conserve energy while the geese in the front, especially the head goose, expend more energy. They carry the burden of the gaggle. (Yes, I used the word gaggle in a sentence!) As a result of using the V formation, they constantly shift places in order to relieve those who are working harder and give them a rest.

2) Geese honk to communicate with one another, and not just communicate but encourage one another. If we could translate what they are saying, we’d hear, “Great job, head goose! Keep up the good work! I can take over whenever you need me to! Whoohoo!”

3) When a goose gets sick and needs to make a pitstop, a handful of other geese stop with it to keep it company while it heals and rests. No goose left behind, you could say.

Alright, so considering his audience, Erik didn’t cite any scientific evidence, and I haven’t bothered to verify any of it either (because, really, does it matter?) But in the end, Erik concluded that no, geese aren’t very silly at all. In fact, they sounded pretty smart to him.

And to me, too.

You could say they’re just a community, working hard at being a community.

And that, my friends, is a lesson we could all stand to remember.

And the imprint of a three-foot snow angel on our driveway that warmed my heart this morning.

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All that to say, thanks for your patience! I’ll get back to the regularly scheduled programming soon.

On Saturday morning over blueberry pancakes, J and I chatted about what we hoped to accomplish for the day, a typical routine for us. I had a laundry list of items I knew I wouldn’t accomplish, but his sounded pretty reasonable, mostly working on the renovation of our basement. By afternoon, if he’d finished with the electrical work, and if the weather was nice, he hoped to head to our nearest Big Box Store to buy more drywall for the ceiling.

This endeavor is always a little complicated, as we drive a two-door Ford Focus hatchback. Though we call this beloved hand-me-down “our little pick-up”–since we’ve managed to squeeze all sorts of enormous furniture into the hatchback–drywall doesn’t fit and of course doesn’t bend.

As a result, we always need to borrow vehicles to get the job done. And with our constant renovation, this happens pretty regularly and becomes a headache.

This is the actual story:

Late morning, we hear a knock on our front door. As I walk up to it, I see a large white pick-up truck parked in our driveway. Oh, geez, I think. Someone wants to clean our gutters. (This happens pretty frequently, which is probably a sign we should, ahem, clean our gutters.)

But then I peek through our window and I see our friend, Harry. (Harry is not his real name. I don’t know anyone named Harry.)

For a second, I’m pretty confused, since Harry and his wife are just about the last people on the planet who would purchase a pick-up truck, especially one this large. They’re the folks who picket against mountain-top removal and contact their congressional representatives on behalf of the underprivileged, for example. But there I see Harry, peeking back at me through the window.

Turns out that through a series of serendipitous events (for us, not for him, since it involved an automobile accident), Harry is driving a pick-up for a few days. A very big pick-up. And Harry stopped by to see if we needed to haul anything today.

Just in case.

Now what’s the chance of that?

And yet another reason I’m glad we’re part of this community…

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 12,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

This morning’s Writer’s Almanac included an interesting blurb about the history of the Times Square ball-dropping tradition. (32,000 LED lights? Who knew?) Mr. Keillor also mentioned the proliferation of item-dropping traditions:

Atlanta, Georgia, drops a giant peach. Eastport, Maine, drops a sardine. Ocean City, Maryland, drops a beach ball, and Mobile, Alabama, drops a 600-pound electric Moon Pie. In Tempe, Arizona, a giant tortilla chip descends into a massive bowl of salsa. Brasstown, North Carolina, drops a Plexiglas pyramid containing a live possum; and Key West, Florida, drops an enormous ruby slipper with a drag queen inside it.

All very, um, interesting, but as I read through this list, I kept hoping they’d mention some of my favorites from central Pennsylvania.

It seems like every little town within an hour’s drive of where I grew up had its own traditions:

* A giant pickle in Dillsburg.
* A lit-up strawberry in Strawberry Square of downtown Harrisburg.
* A red rose in Lancaster.
* A giant French fry from the roof of the Carsonville Hotel.
* A 100-pound stick of bologna in Lebanon.

I kid you not. You’ll notice that on this state-by-state Wikipedia compendium, Pennsylvania outnumbers all of the other states.

I, of course, grew up thinking this was all rather normal. Giant pickle? No problem.

I also grew up thinking it was completely normal to eat sauerkraut on New Years. And I don’t just mean normal, but an absolute 100-percent standard served in every  home and home-cookin’ restaurant. But apparently that’s just a Pennsylvania thing, too.

And that’s okay.

We did, though, add sauerkraut to our grocery list this week.

How will your community be celebrating?