I’m notoriously shy, so it’s with hesitation I put a thumbnail pic of my recent self up here in a spot where folks can see it. However, I think it’s become a kind of necessity. I’ve started to meet many folks who I talk to online, and this can help mitigate the shock some folks have putting a face to the voice.

stormtrack: The Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004

Yahoo!: Year in Review 2005

Yahoo!: 2005 Top Searches

Shelley Powers: Year in Pictures

Philly Future: thebmrant: Matt’s Favorite 20 Albums of 2005 (and some I hated)

Philly Future: Blackmail Is My Life: Weekendered – Best Live Music: Philadelphia’s Top 5 of 2005

Philly Future: thebmrant: Best of 2005–Favorite Philly Shows This Year

John Battelle: Predictions 2006

Jason Calacanis: My Predictions for 2006

Dave Winer: 2006 predictions

Ray Ozzie: Looking back, looking forward

Wired: 2005’s 10 Sexiest Geeks

It’s 12:04 AM now. The start of a new day. My brother Dante’s family has just left, along with my brother Steve, after a great dinner that Richelle put together. I’m looking forward to a good night’s sleep and waking up with her, and Xena our puppy. Drinking coffee together. Opening gifts. Going to church. Then spending the day with her family.

I used to hate Christmas. To me it was a holiday that could only be enjoyed by those who had ‘normal’ lives – people with functioning families – which mine was not. My memories of Christmas past are filled with Salvation Army Santas visiting us, with credit cards driving my mom to bankruptcy, of a sense of what we did not have – of greed.

So if Christmas is about being joyful with no reason to it – then from the perspective I came from – it was bullshit. Like the line in “I Will Buy You A New Life” says: I hate those people who love to tell you, Money is the root of all that kills, They have never been poor, They have never had the joy of a welfare christmas

So here I am now – with a paying job – with a family as normal as one can get – and I am thankful. I don’t feel I deserve to be this blessed. I struggle with that sometimes. But most important – it’s only from *this* perspective that I can see that if a sad soul like myself can make it to a place like this – then anyone can. That God has a place for all of us. Something I most certainly didn’t believe as a kid.

via Slacktivist came a reminder of “My Advent Adventure”, by Anne Lamott. A good read, it influenced this post, a reminder of what Christmas is about:

All of a sudden, the man in front of me soils himself. I guess his sphincter just relaxes. Shit runs down onto his shoes, but he keeps walking. He doesn’t seem to notice.

“However, I do. I clapped a hand over my mouth and nose, and my eyes bugged out but I couldn’t get out of line because of the crush behind me. And so, holding my breath, I walk into the windowless, airless room.

“Now, this meeting has a greeter, which is a person who stands at the door saying hello. And this one is a biker with a shaved head, a huge gut and a Volga boatman mustache. He gets one whiff of the man with shit on his shoes and throws up all over everything.

“You’ve seen the Edvard Munch painting of the guy on the bridge screaming, right? That’s me. That’s what I look like. But Terry enters theroom right behind me. And there’s total pandemonium, no one knows what to do.The man who had soiled himself stumbles forward and plops down in a chair. A fan blows the terrible smells of shit and vomit around the windowless room,and people start smoking just to fill in the spaces in the air. Finally Terry reaches out to the greeter, who had thrown up. He puts his hand on the man’s shoulder.

“Wow,” he says. “Looks like you got caught by surprise.” And they both laugh. Right? Terry asks a couple of guys to go with him down the hall to the men’s room, and help this guy get cleaned up. There are towels there, and kitty litter, to absorb various effluvia, because this is a meeting where people show up routinely in pretty bad shape. So while they’re helping the greeter get cleaned up, other people start cleaning up the meeting room. Then Terry approaches the other man.

“My friend,” he says gently, “it looks like you have trouble here.”

The man just nods.

“We’re going to give you a hand,” says Terry.

“So three men from the recovery house next door help him to his feet, walk him to the halfway house and put him in the shower. They wash hisclothes and shoes and give him their things to wear while he waits. They give him coffee and dinner, and they give him respect. I talked to these other men later, and even though they had very little sobriety, they did not cast this other guy off for not being well enough to be there. Some how this broken guy was treated like one of them, because they could see that he was one of them. No one was pretending he wasn’t covered with shit, but there wasa real sense of kinship. And that is what we mean when we talk about grace.

“Back at the meeting at the Episcopal Cathedral, I was just totally amazed by what I had seen. And I had a little shred of hope. I couldn’t have put it into words, but until that meeting, I had thought that I would recover with men and women like myself; which is to say, over educated, fun to be with and housebroken. And that this would happen quickly and efficiently. But I was wrong. So I’ll tell you what the promise of Advent is: It is that God has set up a tent among us and will help us work together on our stuff. And this will only happen over time.

“For you, Crabby Miss, and for me; together, over time.”

Merry Christmas. May there be peace on earth and good will towards all.