home for Christmas

"...in the Tropics you have sun strokes varied by thunderbolts. 

But all these you have on a broad and brutal scale, 

and you settle down into contentment or despair. "

~G.K. Chesterton

our thermometer as I opened the box of ornaments

It seems to me a serious incongruity - decorating for Christmas in 90 degree weather, with a grueling heat index of 107.  But without much climate change on this island, the decorating helps us to mark the passage of time, the movement from one season to another.  The cinnamon apple candles and poinsettia flowers somehow adjust our inner clocks, making us realize that it's really not still summertime, despite the perpetual summer weather.

And the Christmas traditions when far from our home country seem almost more important for our emotional well-being than they were in America.  So we turn on the fan and the Christmas music, and put up our little tree and hang the wreaths and sing "Let it Snow!" while drinking ice water to keep hydrated. 

The Nativity set is placed in its spot on the window sill, where the glaring morning sun bathes it in radiance.  And I smile to think that Christ came to this earth for men who live in every latitude, every climate.  The hope of the incarnation is not indelibly linked to our western traditions of snowy lawns glowing in Christmas lights, or cozy fires, or stockings on the mantle. 

So it's time for me to settle down into contentment; to celebrate in our tropical heat the gift Christ gave in leaving His home country to enter ours so that we can someday go Home for Christmas.