A lot has been happening to me personally over these Twelve Days of Blogging, so I thought I’d recap the highlights for you including more Christmas miracles and a Hanukkah miracle.
Let’s start with another Christmas miracle. The television remote control was gone. I was the likely culprit having last used it. Did I dodder off in my typical addled state and lay the missing remote in an unfindable place? The full house search revealed nothing. It was missing for two whole days. We spent hours upon hours teaching ourselves how to use the funny buttons on the bottom of the TV to change channels, volume, source, etc. The remote was gone. Grieving had begun. I began sitting shiva in front of the television which I usually do anyway.
And then, my youngest daughter found it under the couch. Just like that. She looked, and there it was. Yes, we had looked under the couches before. I had found a dog ball under one of the couches. Our youngest dog was so happy to see it again that he promptly ate half of it before we could take it away from him. Merry Christmas.
There will be some who say that our ball-eating dog’s tail whisked it off the coffee table and onto the floor under the couch. And that we did a lousy job in looking for it. But I have another theory.
It was a miracle. The Baby Jesus miraculouly vanished our remote, so we could come together as a family as we learned how to operate the television without the remote control. Once we did, the glowing-headed Baby Jesus miraculously returned the remote to us, now a tighter-knit family.
And speaking of the Baby Jesus, why did he have a glowing head when he was in the Nativity scene but not when he was an adult? Was that some sort of glowing cradle cap affliction when he was a newborn?
And what happened to the gold, frankincense, and myrrh that the 3 Wise Men brought the Baby Jesus? Did Mary & Joseph get rich off it? I have a theory. There is a large gap in the life of Jesus in each Gospel. My theory is that Mary & Joseph used the gifts of the Magi to pay for an expensive prep school for Jesus, possibly East Coast from whence the Magi supposedly came. I could understand that. Raising teenagers is hard enough. They think they know everything. My 14-year old daughter’s favorite phrase is, “I know.” Now imagine how difficult it would be to raise a teen Son of God who really did know everything. It would be an intolerable situation. Boarding school was the only logical choice.
Back in July, I commented on a tweet from my favorite local radio station that I loved the Abra Moore song they played as part of their Saturday Morning Flashback show. I didn’t @ Abra Moore or anything creepy like that. I did feature the song in one of my Forgotten One-Hit Wonder blog posts, but who reads those? Now, 5 months later, who likes my Twitter comment? Abra Moore herself.
How is it possible that she just noticed an obscure comment about one of her songs from many months ago? Another Christmas miracle, or is she just really slow at stalking me? If she is slowly stalking me, she needs to lose the husband from her Twitter profile pic.
I didn’t just experience Christmas miracles. How about this for a Hanukkah miracle? Every year in mid-October, I pick all the unripe tomatoes before the first hard frost kills them. I store them in a box in the basement where they slowly ripen, and then we eat fresh vine-ripened tomatoes for the next month or so, like these basement-ripened beauties.
Delicious! But this year, just like the oil in the temple lamps, the tomatoes have miraculously lasted much longer than normal. Here’s the last few left on Christmas Eve.
It is an undeniable Hanukkah miracle.
I consider this more of a Christmas miracle than Hanukkah, because my scabs didn’t last longer than normal. That’s right, scabs … big ones … on my face. I know, you want to see them, but some reader may be drinking eggnog as they peruse this post, and we don’t want that coming back up. It stains. Suffice to say that they were large, nasty scabs on each side of my face that made me want to hurl when I looked at them.
My dermatologist had suggested I use a chemo cream to treat some precancerous spots on my face. The theory is that the cream will only affect the precancerous spots and leave the good skin alone. Well, it seems like my whole face is precancerous as the chemo cream “lit up” a larger and larger area of my face. I had huge scabs on my face just a week before Christmas when I stopped using the cream. There was no way I would be beautiful once again (Editor’s Note: Was he ever?) in time for Christmas. I would be shunned by all, which come to think of it, happens every Christmas to me. Hmm.
Anyway, miraculously the scabs are gone, and I am encouraging people once again to feel the smooth skin on my face. Maybe that’s part of the reason for the shunning.
Regardless of whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, Festivus, or anything else, I hope you all find a miracle or two in your lives this holiday season.
Jim Flanigan Looks at the World 
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