The Golden Rule of any present is the age old adage: "It's the thought that counts."  Over the years some people have taken this to mean that giving someone anything at all - or worse yet, re-gifting them anything at all - somehow implies they were thinking about you and you should be happy no matter what you get.  However, sometimes giving someone a really thoughtless gift is worse than giving them nothing at all.  The "thought" implied in the old phrase is more about how much thought you gave the gift rather than just being about remembering to give one at all.  And here is where, I have found, antiques step up to the plate beautifully almost every time.

A few years ago I was laboring over what to get a friend of mine for Christmas.  He was a good friend (and still is) and I wanted to get him something special but was having hard time finding something unique.  Then one afternoon I was out at a local antique mall, browsing around and simply killing time, when I came across an old Kodak camera from the 1920s.  It was one of those nifty jobs where the lens extends on the end of bellows and it had a million little knobs and settings on it.  My friend likes "neat old things" and also likes gadgets and mechanical things.  So I decided to go out on a limb and try it out.  It turned out to be the perfect gift.  Not only was it not terribly expensive (around the same price as a bottle of cologne) but it was something that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt would not be duplicated by someone else.  And most importantly, my friend loved it.

Quite a few years ago now a co-worker of mine was scoffing at the idea of Christmas.  He thought he was being very clever when he said, “What do trees have to do with Jesus anyway?  That’s pretty stupid if you ask me.”  Well no one had asked him and although I was fully prepared to explain the ancient symbolism of Christmas traditions I didn’t waste my breath.  Anyone who could simply dismiss wholesale a holiday celebrated annually by millions of people around the world wasn’t worth continuing a conversation with, in my opinion.

No matter what your views of Christmas are or what your spiritual beliefs may be, the history of Christmas and its seemingly unusual traditions is a fascinating subject.  In a day and age when making fun of Christmas, or simply disregarding it altogether, has become fashionable I thought I would take the time to share a bit of what I know about Christmas and why many of us do the things we do every December.