Saints and Sinners: Enjoying Christmas at home

This will be Tom’s second Christmas with us. It will be ? if he comes home.

As I write this, Tom is out prowling somewhere. In the past, when he has had the urge to prowl, Tom has stayed away days and nights at a time. Just when we would figure he was gone for good, he would come home. “Tom’s home!” somebody would shout. We would break open a carton of milk, pour some out for Tom, and it was like the Prodigal Son returning. A couple of days before last Christmas, the old wanderlust got to Tom again and he was off. All I could do was hope he made it home for Christmas.

There was a time when it wouldn’t have made any difference to me whether Tom ever returned. He came uninvited into our lives last summer ? a stray cat with cuts and bruises all over him, a piece of his right ear gone and a ravenous appetite. It brought out the pity in the little girls at my house ? but not in me.

“Don’t feed that cat,” I said, “or he’ll never leave.”

But you know what chance a man has when the women in his house are lined up against him. And sure enough, Tom set up housekeeping on the back porch.

“All right, but he’s not to come in the house,” I announced firmly. “One dog and cat in the house is enough.”

Everybody agreed.

But then the winter weather came, and someone decided one night that Tom would be cold out on the porch. When I opened the pantry door the next morning to get my cereal, there was Tom.

“Who let this cat in?” I bellowed.

Silence.

But, of course, Tom has been inside ever since ? except for his occasional forays to who-knows-where. I have even started calling him “Tom” like everybody else ? instead of “that cat.” He has become part of that picture of home ? “eternity framed in domesticity,” to quote Mrs. Miniver ? which is what Christmas means to me.

Phillips Brooks, who wrote “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” once said about that first Christmas: “A father and a mother and a child were there. No religion which began like that could ever lose its character.”

He might have added that the animals were there, too. A donkey carried the virgin mother to Bethlehem on that far-off night so long ago. And the animals helped to keep it warm in the manger where the baby Jesus was born.

When the 19th-century English writer Thomas Hardy and his brothers and sisters were children, they were told by their parents that if they should go out into the barn on Christmas Eve at midnight, they would find all the animals kneeling down in adoration of the Christ Child. The adult Hardy tells the story in one of his poems and goes on to say:

“So fair a fancy few would weave / In these years. Yet I feel / If someone said on Christmas Eve, ‘Come; see the oxen kneel / In the lonely barton by yonder comb / Our childhood used to know,’ I should go with him in the gloom, / Hoping it might be so.”

Last year, Tom arrived home on Christmas Eve, just before we left for church. I figure he knew all along he would come home, but with his sense of the dramatic, he waited until the last minute to spring his surprise and is scheduled to do the same for this Christmas.

George Plagenz is an ordained minister and veteran newsman based in Columbus, Ohio.