Christmas Needs Love to Be Christmas (as sung by Juice Newton)

I s*bscribe to the DailyOM e-newsletter, as does my friend M - she posted the one below on her blog yesterday but it was so appropriate for my theme today I'm using it here now (the cliche of "a day late and a dollar short" had to be written about me... :-)

Okay, rhetorical question but... how much do we love The Grinch... and his little dog Max?!? - it's a holiday staple!

DailyOM
December 11, 2007
What We Are Made Of
Choose Love

Love is often presented as the opposite of fear, but true love is not opposite anything. True love is far more powerful than any negative emotions, as it is the environment in which all things arise. Negative emotions are like sharks swimming in the ocean of love. All things beautiful and fearful, ugly and kind, powerful and small, come into existence, do their thing, and disappear within the context of this great ocean. At the same time, they are made of the very love in which they swim and can never be separated. We are made of this love and live our whole lives at one with it, whether we know it or not.

It is only the illusion that we are separate from this great love that causes us to believe that choosing anything other than love makes sense or is even possible. In the relative, dualistic world of positive and negative, darkness and light, male and female, we make choices and we learn from them. This is exactly what we are meant to be doing here on earth. Underlying these relative choices, though, is the choice to be conscious of what we are, which is love, or to be unconscious of it. When we choose to be conscious of it, we choose love.

We will still exist in the relative world of opposites and choices and cause and effect, and we will need to make our way here, but doing so with an awareness that we are all made of this love will enable us to be more playful, more joyful, more loving and wise, as we make our way. Ultimately, the choices we make will shed light on the love that makes us all one, enabling those who have forgotten to return to the source.

This world makes it easy to forget this great love, which is part of why we are here. We are here to remember and, when we forget to remember again, to choose love.

SONG: Christmas Needs Love to Be Christmas (as sung by Juice Newton)

BOOK: How the Grinch Stole Christmas - Anniversary Edition: A 50th Anniversary Retrospective by Dr. Seuss

POEM: My Daughter at 14: Christmas Dance by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Panic in your face, you write questions
to ask him. When he arrives,
you are serene, your fear
unbetrayed. How unlike me you are.

After the dance,
I see your happiness; he holds
your hand. Though you barely speak,
your body pulses messages I can read

all too well. He kisses you goodnight,
his body moving toward yours, and yours
responding. I am frightened, guard my
tongue for fear my mother will pop out

of my mouth. "He is not shy." You giggle,
a little girl again, but you tell me he
kissed you on the dance floor. "Once?"
I ask. "No, a lot."

We ride through the rain-shining 1 A.M.
streets. I bite back words which long
to be said, knowing I must not shatter your
moment, fragile as a spun-glass bird,

you, the moment, poised on the edge of
flight, and I, on the ground, afraid.

QUOTE: "It is Christmas in the heart that puts Christmas in the air." ~ W.T. Ellis