The Griffin Christmas Parade

My wife Ginger and my older son Andrew were here for the holiday. He and I went to see the balloons blown up around the Museum of Natural History on Wednesday night. We staked out a pretty good spot to watch the Thanksgiving Day Parade along 7th Avenue. It was actually our second time. The last one was 24 years ago. Andrew was four. I carried him on my back with his little brother, then six months old, strapped to my chest in a snuggly. It was my senior year at General Seminary.

           

The next year found us in Griffin, Georgia, which I like to describe as 40 miles and a hundred years south of Atlanta.  It was the smallest place I have ever lived.  And it was quite an adjustment from living in Manhattan.

           

However, Griffin, like New York, had its parade.  Griffin’s parade was not on Thanksgiving Day, but like the Macy’s event, it ushered in the holiday season, and it occurred during the first week in December.  Of course, Ginger and I took our boys.

It wasn’t as hard to find a place to watch.  There was no crowd.  There were no celebrities except for local politicians.  There were flatbed trucks, lots of them, decorated with crepe paper carrying one group or another throwing Christmas candy to the children. The junior cheerleaders marched.  There might have been a horse or two.  There was a fire truck.  The high school band played Christmas carols.  And, like the Macy’s Parade, Santa Claus came last. 

           

After Santa’s appearance, we got ready to go home.  Andrew wasn’t ready to leave.  I noticed he was looking up into the sky.  He was filled with hope.  “When do the balloons come?” he asked.   Andrew’s only experience of parades prior to Griffin was the Thanksgiving Parade in New York.  He had high expectations. 

           

To my surprise he accepted quite readily that there were no balloons in the Griffin Christmas Parade.  He accepted reality for what it was.  But it didn’t stop him from hoping.  One thing reality does not control is hope.

           

Advent is a season to hope.  It is not a season of shopping, Black Friday and Cyber Monday notwithstanding.  It is not a season of getting, or even giving.  It is a season of hoping, hoping in God, in God’s dream for us, in humanity’s basic goodness.  It is the season of hope, not for what might be under the tree, but that God’s dream will be made actual and real by our participation in it. 

           

It took 24 years, but Andrew saw the balloons again.  There were some he might have seen last time as well as some new ones.  As I discovered this weekend, Andrew doesn’t remember any of those two parades so long ago.  I don’t really care about that.  What I do care about is that his character be shaped by hoping.  That is what matters.  Hope.

Hoping is enough, I believe, to make things real enough.  “Endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us”  (Rom 5:4-5).   

           

Advent is intended to remind us of that.

Peace, 

+Stacy