Kahu's Manao

Keawala‘i Congregational Church
United Church of Christ (USA)

Christmas Eve
Thursday, December 24, 2009

The Rev. Kealahou C. Alika

“Home and Family”
Luke 1:1-20

My sister Jill gave me a bag filled with tangerines on Wednesday night. She picked them from a tree growing in her back yard.

When I was growing up in Kona one of the special memories I have of the Christmas season was getting a brown paper bag filled with fruit – it was usually a tangerine though on other Christmases I would find an apple or an orange. Usually there were a few pieces of candy and if we were lucky it would be more than the red peppermint candy or yellow butterscotch – there might be an occasional Hershey’s chocolate bar.

The bag might include a box of raisins, although at the time I didn’t like raisins all that much. The bag was also filled with nuts – usually almonds still in their shells and there would always be nuts shaped like giant brown slugs which were as hard as rocks.

It was impossible to break the nut open even with a hammer. Once the shell was cracked open you had to dig out whatever there was on the inside. Needless to say it was not my favorite nut and to this day I have no idea what it was called.

The tangerine I received from my sister reminded me of other memories that I have of Christmases past and almost always they were about the lights of Christmas.

There was a very small town not from where we lived that consisted of one street. The only way to get to and from school was to drive through the town. There was a movie theater, a bakery, and a dry goods store. There was a place where you could go shopping for groceries.

Next door was a produce store that only sold fresh fruits and vegetables and right after that there was a shoe store. Further down there was a furniture store and a laundromat.

On the other side of the street there was a doctor’s office, a bowling alley, a watch repair store, and a bar. Next to the bar was a five and dime, a hardware store, and a coffee mill.

Every year the merchants of the town would string Christmas lights across the street from one end of town to the other. All told there may have been about 24 strings of light.

If you blinked really slow you would get from one end of the town to the other in about ten blinks. We lived on the north side of the town and other family members lived on the south side of the town.

Whenever we would visit family we would pass through town. One of my most favorite things to do was to lay my head far back so I could look out and up the back window.

I would squeeze my eyelids together in a way that they would wrap themselves around my eyeballs just to the point of covering them completely. By squinting the colors of the light would blur and twinkle at the same time.

It was easy to squint and wash all of the strings of lights go by without blinking once. It may not seem like much to others who see the lights of big cities, but for me it was magical moment.

The other magical moment that came was when we would plug in the lights of our Christmas tree. They were always multi-colored lights and that usually meant red, white, green and yellow. I would squint at the tree lights too.

When I think about the lights of Christmas, I know what made them magical or special was that I was with my family. I was home. Whether it was riding in the back of my tütü’s or grandpa’s car squinting at the lights as we drove through town or squinting at the lights that my auntie had strung on the Christmas tree.

Grandpa died 46 years ago and my auntie died just last month. I miss them both very much.

Christmas is always a time about home and family.

I grew up going to church and my mother would remind me that Christmas was really about the birth of Jesus. Although she didn’t say it seemed that a lot of other folks were saying that Christmas was not about Christmas trees or Christmas presents or Christmas lights.

After a while I started thinking it wasn’t even about family – about my family; about grandpa or my auntie or my mom, or any of our families. It was a special time because it was supposed to be only about Jesus saving the world from sadness and sorrow and all of us from sin.

One day I realized that Jesus had a family too. Before he was born, he lived with his mom and dad in a village called Nazareth.

When his mom was about to give birth to him, they traveled to a big city called Bethlehem and it was there that he was born, not in a hospital, but in a place where animals were kept. As a baby, he lived in another country called Egypt. He had brothers and sisters.

When they returned home to Israel, they settled down. From the time he was a boy he went to the Temple to worship and to learn about God.

There were moments in his own life that were magical and special because he was surrounded by those who loved him and cared for him and because he knew how much God loved him. I know now that it is because of God’s love for him and for all of us that Jesus was born.

I love this tangerine.

The lights of Christmas and tangerines will always be special to me because they remind of family and home and that Jesus is the Light of the World. On a night such as this, holy and bright, we have reason to be thankful that we are here. Mahalo ke Akua. Thanks be to God.

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