Now if you are on the other side of the spectrum: a true “bah humbug” Scrooge you may think that you are perfectly safe. No sugarplums for you this season! By the way you might be interested in knowing that there was once a Society dedicated to the Abolishment of Christmas. Bernhard Shaw founded this society and until his death remained the one and only member. Ah, but cynics beware for this season has a way of sneaking up on you. Scrooge in Dickens’ story is frightened into remorse as he remembers the time he too believed in something. The candlelight, if we let it, will shine into our souls and illuminate them. Will we like what we find there? Will we find hope and wonder? Will we find peace within us?

Or will we forget in all the loud noises of the wars and violence in this world what these days are really about. Peace, yes but more than peace: the stubborn hope that peace is possible. Hopes and great expectations are what make these holidays both so potentially joyful and so stressful. It is easier to become cynical and not believe any longer in anything than it is to hope in times when the world is erupting in ever more senseless violence. How can we enjoy these days when there is so much work to be done? What do we tell our children? That they are safe and we will do all we can to keep them so. That is a good beginning. But what do we tell ourselves? Our country in the grips of understandable fear and just anger is facing yet another test. Yes, the talk about civil rights and secret military tribunals and prisoners held on suspicion alone frightens me. Is that who we are? Who are the patriots here? Can we enjoy these holy days or should we man (or woman) the barricades or maybe do both? My former colleague William Schultz, twice the president of our denomination now heads Amnesty International. My way of dealing with this is to support them and other institutions that do the hard and unpopular work of looking out for everyone’s yes, even terrorist’s civil rights. You may feel differently. Act on your beliefs then. And do simple things. Food pantries here in the Valley are lacking the usual holiday overflow. Families can help other less fortunate families. There is no better way to forget your fears and worries than to look outside yourself.

Step off the holiday thread mill and simplify your life. The joy this season lies not in the things we give. On the backdrop of suffering let us look deeper this season.

This is the time of waiting for the great holy days of light: Christmas, Solstice, Hanukkah and the relative latecomer to this annual orgy of celebrations: Kwanza. This is the season of great expectations. As a child I got up in the pitch black cold of a Danish December morning and carefully open up one more door in the advent paper calendar and think with joy: only ten more days till Christmas! Now that I am grown I still wait and hope, for joy, for peace, for answers to life’s mysteries. Yes, I still love the holidays. And I confess that I am addicted to candles.

What are you waiting for? Have the expectations got you down? Are you overwhelmed, overstressed and overspent by trying to live up to that elusive image of a perfect, an unremittingly happy holiday that may only exist in our childhood memories? I have been there myself, up all night baking cookies, wrapping gifts ever so carefully and stressing out in crowded stores over that one perfect present. If you wonder if one can really buy happiness well, then try to remember what you got last year under the tree. Ask you children if they remember. Then ask them about a special time you spent together. Selecting a tree, playing a game, the gift of time and attention in our overscheduled and hurried world may be the most precious of all.

And remember that you are not supposed to feel one particular way this season either. Jane Rzepka writes: Ministers' columns at this time of the year say one of two things: The holiday season is a happy time," or” the holidays are depressing." The "happy time" school of thought makes a case for generosity, good cheer, and a deepening spirituality, whereas the "depression" advocates cite studies that prove the winter holidays are difficult. At the moment, the "happy holidays" group has a slight edge, the freshest crop of Ph.D.s having studied our December holidays and find them to be merry after all. I beg to differ. With no empirical work at all to back me up, I'd like to make a case for people being regular people even when December rolls around. Sure, Mom is frantic after Thanksgiving, but she is a frantic person in general. Brother John is nonchalant about the holidays, but he's always been the laid-back type. Aunt Martha gears up for a family squabble, but remember, she set up a round or two in July. Uncle John is a natural Santa, but he's a sweetie all year long. In our family, we will incessantly exclaim, "Where's your Christmas spirit?" from Thanksgiving until the twenty-fifth. This phrase, at our house, has always been an obnoxious code for "Lighten up, it's Christmastime, act merry, not human." I'm changing the code. This year "Christmas spirit" will refer to the fact that we are who we are, merry or depressed, and we love each other anyway.

That is a good beginning. Yes, we may well be of many shifting moods, have vivid memories and with every year we live we will have more people to remember who are no longer with us. Our hearts may suddenly open at the fragrance of pine and fir, as we hear that special tune, as we watch the late afternoon light and remember. In my family we had a custom in this season where we would as my grandmother said: keep the twilight. Which meant that we would sit and watch as the blue light descended over the busy city and watch the candles glow ever brighter with the growing darkness. It was a sacred time for listening and watching. You likely have other memories, other rituals that you recall as the heart of this season. And at least to my ears there is also a certain gentle madness in the air that can bring us exuberance and joy or it can make you feel frantic, hurried and way too busy. For underlying all the commercial noise and lights, all the incessant jingles and demands, all the give me of the season there it is: hope! If we listen closely enough we will hear it. Hopes we can at least imagine when we sing them: peace on earth, goodwill to men, joy to this wounded and worried world! Dare we dream this season and say that even in places like Bethlehem there will one day be peace? But hope is not limited to global concerns it lives in our human hearts. Emily Dickinson wrote: Hope is a strange invention - A patent of the heart - In unremitting action - Yet never wearing out. But perhaps her best known words about hope are these: Hope is the thing with feathers - that perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words- And never stops at all.

The first step to keeping some measure of joy in this season and some sanity too is to admit what our hopes really are. What do you long for this season? Is it possible? Or do have trouble hoping at all? Are you in place where you seem to have lost hope? Or in a place where it seems safer not to hope at all?

Martin Smith has some wise words about hope. He writes: Hope has nothing in common with optimism, a cheap over the counter drug for maintaining denial. Hope is not only compatible with, but actually requires, a courageous facing of death and vulnerability. Hope…is a strenuous expectation of creative newness and meaning in our lives.

We speak of giving false hope but that is not what I am taking about. Certainly we can hope for too much such as a perfect holiday, where the house is in perfect order, all the beautiful and creative decorations up, according to the latest glossy home decorating magazine and all the cookies are colorfully decorated and home made. In such a house the turkey is never tough or overcooked, the presents are just what everyone wanted and no one disagrees, or get tired or fight. Never mind that the current gurus of home decorating such as Martha Stewart have a whole army of Santa’s helpers and great photographers. Never mind that even if such perfection were possible at the center of this perfect house and people would be a great emptiness for it would not be real. Real holidays and real families, real people are of many shifting moods especially around the holidays. Real hope is found in the most difficult places. Sometimes we find it at the bedside of people who are very ill, who are hoping for a little more time with those they love, wanting simple things such as one more sunrise. Our hopes, our expectations determine how we will be this season. Marc S. Mullinax writes: Without a sense of expectation there can be no proper preparation. We prepare during Advent but for what? Miracles? Angels? Presents? The quality of our expectations will inform, for better or for worse, the quality of this season for us… How about having an adventure this advent? What do you hope for? What are you waiting for?

What is this time really about? Keith A. Russell presents us with a different view. He writes: How can we have only one coat and enough food to live comfortably if the standard is to consume in order to be saved? At the moment mountains of debt and valleys filled with the leftovers of our consumption make it near to impossible to “ prepare the way for the Lord”."

He comes from a different tradition than we do but he has a point. This is a very tough year for ministers and for rabbis. We want to keep the wonder and joy in these holy days but we also want to go deeper and call upon the better angels of our natures. And for Unitarian Universalist ministers this season can resemble walking a tightrope over an abyss balancing among the all the diverse traditions and beliefs. Can we honor Christmas, Hanukkah and Solstice at the same time? Can we give something to all of us and still say anything of meaning at all?

There are times I wonder. There was a cartoon I saw at which I cringed, somewhat self-consciously. It shows a minister greeting a parishioner after a Sunday Service. The well dressed lady is effusive in her praise. Oh, I just loved your sermon today. It gave me such a “Christmasy” feeling! Just like the department store! Ouch! I hope not! But then I wonder what does this woman experience in the department store?

What are we all searching for? Happiness? Joy? Peace? Security? For what are we waiting this season? Is it a rebirth, a leading star? Or just some time to be? Felicia Y. Thomas, a minister pregnant with her second child, wrote: I am not a patient person by nature, but I am convinced that if you act patiently long enough, patience comes. Even so I do not like to wait especially without a book in hand or something else to occupy those idle moments …Advent reminds us of a special blessed kind of waiting - waiting in expectation. Which is harder? Waiting without any hope of progress, movement, change? Or waiting with full expectation that something will happen, that transformation will take place?

Are you a patient person? Or more like a child who wakes his parents at four o’clock on Christmas morning because he just can’t wait any longer? This season holds many lessons in waiting for us. There is the eternal image of a woman heavy with child, waiting with increased impatience but the child as Christmas will come in his or her own sweet time. We wait as children for our parents to come home, for our birthday to come, for summer holidays, for Christmas or Hanukkah or Easter. All summer long zwe wait for cooler weather. And those who are wounded in soul or body hope and wait for healing, for health, for recovery or for peace. There is a British comedy series about independent rebellious older people living in a retirement home. It is called: Waiting for God.

Advent is about waiting for the re-birth of hope. Child like we hope to find sometime this season: Joy in the morning. Henri Nouven writes: The spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, trusting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination, fantasy or prediction.

Such as joy when we are in the midst of grief. We can wait well when we have expectations, when we have hope. Albert Einstein when asked “what is the most important question you can ask in life?” answered: Is the Universe a friendly place or not? The Universalists asked the same question in a slightly different way: Is God good? And answered in the affirmative with a God of love. What we believe will determine how we experience the world. If we believe in angels we will likely see them. If we believe in a God of love we may act more loving. If we believe the universe is a friendly place we might live with more trust. But a skeptical or cynical shepherd will never look up at the nighttime sky, and so she or he will never heard the music of the spheres, the voices of the heavenly chorus. A skeptical wise woman or man won’t even walk across the street let alone thousands of miles, to see some manifestation of the divine in a lowly manger...

Can we find joy this season? I hope and pray that we will. So what are you waiting for? Where do you find your hope? Henri remembers: When I stand with our congregation and sing Silent Night on Christmas Eve, that for me is a moment of real enchantment. A feeling of peace comes over me and I feel there is nothing whatsoever that is impossible for this congregation.

I understand exactly what he means. There are Sundays when I come here tired or discouraged and at the end I look around at all of your faces and say to myself: For this congregation anything is possible.

Take heart! For joy shall be ours in the morning!