If there exists a chink in my armor, a crack in my carefully curated veneer of manliness, it is sentimentality. Truth be told, it’s less a chink and more a gaping hole that leaves all my vital organs unprotected.
There was a time when I could emerge from a Pixar movie or the last chapter of Where the Red Fern Grows pretty much unscathed. No more. These days, if you show me a CGI kid playing the guitar for his grandma or a heartsick redbone hound, I turn into a blubbering buffoon. I’d blame my kids, but they’d tell you I was a sentimental fool long before they came along. And they wouldn’t be lying.
If sentiment is my Achilles’ heel, Christmastime is the Apollo-guided arrow that slays me. Twinkling lights, "Silver Bells" playing over the grocery store speakers, big red noses zip-tied to the grills of pickups – it all brings an inordinate level of glee to my spirit.
For 11 months of the year, the internet and television airwaves are reserved for petty arguments and soul-sucking vitriol. But come December, most of that garbage is replaced with Coke-sipping polar bears, anthropomorphic M&M's and agonizingly cheesy made-for-TV movies. And it all gets to me.
No matter which portrayal it is, I’m right there with Scrooge in feeling “light as a feather … happy as an angel … merry as a schoolboy.” The waterworks start every time Uncle Billy dances in the door with that big basketful of cash from all the neighbors and dumps it on George Bailey’s table in It’s a Wonderful Life. And, like anybody with a heart not made of stone, mine grows three sizes right along with the Grinch’s.
The denouement of the whole thing, of course, is the reading of the Christmas story out of the Good Book. With every passing year, I feel more able to put myself in Mary and Joseph’s shoes: exhausted, desperate, scared, inadequate, wanting nothing more than to go home to protect and love the precious child with whom they had been entrusted. Proud and practical people, touched, humbled, bolstered by the gifts and protection – however humble or grand – offered by the people around them.
No matter the variety or level of your faith, the Nativity is undeniably a beautiful human-interest story that anyone can relate to on some level. In my experience, ag folk, and particularly cow folk, are the exact kind of people Christmas means a whole lot to. Odds are you wouldn’t still be in this business if you didn’t treat raising cattle like, you know, a business. But you also wouldn’t be in this line of work if there weren’t at least a small romantic – dare I say, sentimental – streak in you.
So go ahead; drink it in. Savor the smell of the hay dust as you flake it off for the old girls, then do the same for the cocoa and pine aroma filling the house. Take a moment to appreciate your kid’s improved head loop on the dummy in the front yard. Tell someone you love – out loud – that you love them. If a tear forms in the corner of your eye, let it stay.
And have a merry Christmas.
