Merry Christmas to everyone! This Christmas (or, "Fisfuss," as we cheerfully call it here, in honor of the way my oldest daughter pronounced it when she was 2 years old) has been more than memorable. Probably the best place to begin is a couple of days ago.
We weren't getting mail for awhile and didn't know it. The postman had decided that our dog, Angel, was threatening him (yes, she was quite a barker). We were trying to get a permanent place set up for her for the winter; we had a dog house, but Shauri, being from Arizona, felt that our poor dog would be too cold in it. We kept her instead in the mudroom while Shauri built a doghouse out of pink insulating styrofoam and board--but Angel figured out how to open the mudroom door and kept escaping. Which lead to the postman feeling threatened and the neighbors calling the police a few times. An officer came by and said that if Angel was seen running loose again, we'd be taken to court. And the post office finally called on Thursday to say that the mail wasn't going to be delivered until we had a permanent solution to restrict Angel's freedom.
When Shauri told me this I got a sinking feeling. "You mean, nobody has been picking up our mail?" I had put a letter in our mailbox the Saturday before, authorizing our broker to liquidate a portion of our retirement assets. I had been planning on the check arriving by the end of the following week--last week--to cover a gap between paychecks. My current job pays less per month than we need to pay bills, and I put in for a raise a month ago to cover the gap, to cooincide with the completion of my doctoral degree. When they hired me, they agreed to a raise when my Ph.D. was finished, but the negotiations have not been going very fast. So...we've been slowly bleeding out our retirement savings while being glad for a job that will allow me to participate in the
National Health Services Corps--a government program for healthcare and mental healthcare workers in underserved areas, that will forgive up to $50,000 per year for two years of student loan debt. It sounds like a great tradeoff, but of course you have to keep making your student loan payments along the way, so it doesn't help with your monthly expenses during the two years you're in the program. Also, I won't be eligible to start the program until next year, so we've had to wait and we still haven't started the program.
Back to the story. So the check was going to arrive too late to save Christmas (fisfuss). The kids didn't know it, but Shauri and I were feeling a lot of stress about it. Then on Friday last week I had an epiphany, a heart-changing experience, and it had to do with Angel.
Shauri and the kids have been wanting for quite some time to make Angel into a house dog, but I have refused. I've been very allergic to animal dander, and haven't wanted to share my house with an animal that sheds. Every couple of months the issue would be brought up again, and I would have to remind everyone that Papa is allergic to dogs.
However, that isn't entirely true. Last year my chiropractor, kinesiologist, and homeopath, Dr. Terry Burk of Huxley, Iowa, using the methods of
Dr. Brett Brimhall, was able to get my body to release most of the emotional causes of my allergic reactions to animal dander. Since then, I have had a much better time around animals--but I'm still wary of them and still avoid touching them when I can help it. I haven't been sure how permanent the change was, and since we've moved to southeastern Iowa, we haven't been able to see Dr. Burk as often, so I didn't want to test the limits of my newly acquired tolerance for animals. Unlike our kids, who love to go up and cuddle Angel, I avoid her as much as possible.
On Friday last week, I was at the middle school where I do therapy work, and I was observing the therapy dog that they have there. The full-time school counselor has gotten him trained and approved, and usually brings him to school every day. I was watching how people come up to him and cuddle him and baby-talk with him--adults and kids alike--and it struck me how radically different it is having an indoor pet that you can live with versus an outdoor pet that you only see when you go outside. I remembered a couple of years back when I heard an animal advocate on the radio talk about how much you're missing of the experience of having a pet if you're not living with it. (It was Kim Langholz on
WOI's Talk of Iowa program.) I looked at this dog, how clean he's kept, and how much he's loved, how much time he spends with people, and something inside me said, "That's what we need to do with Angel."
So I called Shauri and waited for her to finish something with the kids, and told her the news. Angel would have to get housetrained. But as soon as she was bathed and brushed, she could be a house dog. Shauri could hardly believe what she was hearing. "This is major!" she said, two or three times. When I got home that night, Angel was happily a part of the family. We're still trying to figure out a few logistics of the new arrangement, but it has been a totally different home, these past several days, to have a dog inside. She is very gentle, doesn't nip at anyone (even when our 10-month old pulls on her face), and very obedient. She made Christmas (fisfuss) especially memorable this year.
"But what about the finances," you might be asking. That was all taken care of in the most miraculous way. Last Wednesday, when our account balance was zero and we had no idea how we'd get through the holiday, our local church put together Christmas boxes for families that it knew would be needing a little something to get through the holiday. NO, we were not one of the families--that is not where this is going! Most of the families have single parents, and they are much worse off than we are. The boxes were mostly to provide Christmas (fisfuss) dinners--there would be Christmas hams, scalloped potatoes, dinner rolls, and so forth. A few weeks ago I signed up to help--thinking it would not be a hardship to contribute the salads for the 6 families. But on Wednesday, we had nothing to buy the salads with--except some rolls of coins that I keep squirreled away for emergencies. (They're uncirculated from the US Mint, which helps to keep them unopened and makes them perfect as an emergency cash fund). We knew that this was not a time to back out. When I sent Shauri to go buy the salads, it felt like a sacrifice, which I think to me made it all the more meaningful. It also meant that I had an opened roll of coins now. That came in handy Friday night, when I was running out of gas on the way home from work, and was able to stop and fill up. The universe is full of hidden blessings.
That same day, Friday, after I called Shauri and told her that Angel could become a house dog, she went to the post office to pick up our backlog of mail. There was a big stack of Christmas (fisfuss) cards, and we began opening them that evening, one by one. It was wonderful to hear from our family and friends. We wished we had sent out Christmas (fisfuss) cards, but this year we just weren't able. There was one card with no return address, that wasn't signed, and we couldn't recognize the handwriting (to me it looks like different handwriting on the envelope and card). The postmark could apply to about 20 different relatives, and only heaven knows if it even was one of them.
Inside the card was enough to cover the paycheck gap and get us through the end of the year. Shauri and I were speechless. We looked at the card, looked at the envelope, looked at each other. "I'm so glad we've been paying out tithing," she said. Shauri and I gathered the kids together and we knelt down around the coffee table (we call it the Chocolate Table), and told them what had happened. We said we were going to say a prayer together to thank Heavenly Father for touching someone's heart and blessing our family, and asking Him to bless our anonymous Christmas angel. Our oldest asked if she could say it, and she offered a beautiful prayer from the heart that was perfectly appropriate.
We were able to go on Saturday and Monday and buy Christmas presents for our kids and food for the next week--we had been hoping that the broker check would arrive in time for that, but it hadn't, because the authorization letter hadn't gotten out on time. I kept thinking about the anonymous Christmas (fisfuss) angel as we set out the gifts on Christmas Eve, and as our children opened their presents the next morning. We had another Angel there with us, licking faces and joyfully wagging her tail, spreading Christmas (fisfuss) cheer. I only got an itchy eye once, after scratching behind her ears (she seems to believe that I like her, and approaches me constantly) and then touching my face, but it went away faster than I would have thought.
As we opened the presents and watched our children's joy over the gifts their relatives sent, we felt again the gratitude for loved ones who thought of us this year. We had a cousins gift exchange that we participated in, but some relatives went a step beyond that and bought presents for the whole family. Amazingly generous, and so very like them. And there were several other gifts we opened on Christmas that lke the anonymous card were surely sent with the prompting of Christmas angels--a graduation card with $50, a Walmart card with $25. We will be fine this month, and it is mostly because of the generosity and kindness of those who love and care for us.
We feel so blessed and so grateful. I hope that their hearts are full of the same joy that we have felt when we've been able to give like this. My most memorable Christmas (fisfuss) as a boy was one year when I was about nine, when our family anonymously helped out another family in my neighborhood. They had a son my age, and it was all I could do when we later played Army men together to not tell him that I knew where he had gotten his Jeep from. But it also warmed me immensely when I saw him playing with it, and I knew we had done a good thing. We know that it is a blessing to be able to give as well as receive, and we hope that those Angels who helped us this year will feel that same joy that I felt when I was a boy.
Merry Christmas (fisfuss)!