Muddling Through

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
Next year all our troubles will be out of sight
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Make the yuletide gay
Next year all our troubles will be miles away

Once again as in olden days
Happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who are dear to us
Will be near to us once more

Someday soon we all will be together
If the fates allow
Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now

From the Song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane

My Mother was rarely sentimental as we grew up. With five boys and one girl I suppose there was really no time for it! Her days were filled with the more mundane things – feeding a hungry family of eight, keeping our busy farmhouse clean, working in our monstrous garden, and doing the mountain of laundry that always seemed to be accumulating. Laundry alone consumed one entire workday each week. We were in no way deprived growing up on the farm even though I guess by any American standard we were poor. But because of my Dad’s industrious ways and my Mom’s hard work we really didn’t know it.

So, it is memorable to me that one Christmas carol would bring tears to her eyes each time she heard it – “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” sung by Judy Garland. My Mother was especially close to her brother Les – the namesake of MY oldest brother. They were closest in age in her very large family. So, she was filled with such pride and such fear when he marched off with Patton’s army in World War II. He served as a medical corpsman in North Africa and Italy and then waited in England where they served as a decoy to the Germans in preparation for D-Day. He was not part of that invasion but came to the European Theater later with Patton and fought in the Battle of the Bulge and numerous other engagements. As with most veterans from The Greatest Generation he did not talk a lot about his experiences in the war. But he witnessed horrific things. When he enlisted in 1941, he wrote to my Mother that he expected that it would all be over in four or five months. As time went by, he thought it might take a year. He came home in October of 1945 – FOUR YEARS LATER!

I think we really fail to properly understand how things were on the home front in those dark days. For a long time at the beginning of the war, there wasn’t a lot of good news. It was not assumed that the Allies would prevail. And even if we did, every family worried about what THE PERSONAL cost of that victory would be for them. Would their loved ones come home? And we all know that hundreds of thousands of our troops did NOT come home. When Judy Garland recorded this song in 1943, my Mother was not at all certain when or even if she would celebrate Christmas with her brother again. So, she had to cling to the phrase – “through the years we all will be together if the fates allow, until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow”. She “muddled through” and she was blessed, Uncle Les DID come home safely.

So, what is my point? This Christmas will be difficult for most of us, or at least strange and so different from our traditions. Jan and I will not gather with our family as we always do. We won’t be in church on Christmas Eve, substituting a video or a parking lot candle-light service. It makes me sad and a little emotional. But then I think of the profound sadness and worry that my Mother and all those families caught up in the maelstrom of war felt. How did they muddle through? And then I think of the hundreds of thousands of families who have lost loved ones to COVID 19, many in our church and among our acquaintances. How will THEY muddle through? I feel pretty silly to be sad at how we are NOT going to celebrate Christmas. Clearly, we WILL muddle through this all somehow. And we will be together again soon. Why am I so sure of that? I think that it has to do with hope. This is after all, the season of hope.

Well, truthfully there are lots of reasons to NOT be hopeful. There has been so much death this year and so many people grieving. The economy is in tatters. There is a reported NEW strain of the virus with unknown potential for hurting us. Climate change is real, and I believe it to be an existential threat. We just went through a bitterly fought election that is STILL not resolved in the minds of many. We are more divided than we have ever been. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is ever widening. Things are kind of a mess. We truly ARE unfit stewards for this world that God has left us in.

But there is the key to our hope. There is a Higher Power. God is still on his throne. We are especially mindful at this time of year that He will spare no cost to take care of us. After all, He sent a part of himself, his only Son on a rescue mission that cost more than we can really even understand. So that is why I believe that things ARE going to be better. We should not despair. Or to quote the other Christmas carol that makes ME a little misty eyed – “The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on earth and good will to men.”

May this find you hopeful, healthy, and happy and may you have a Very Merry Christmas and a Joyous Happy New Year.