Hmm?
What star sign is he?
Capricorn.
Capricorn, eh? What are they like?
Oh, but He is the son of God, our Messiah. King of the Jews.
And that's Capricorn, is it?
Uh, no, no, no. That's just Him.
Oh, I was going to say. Otherwise, there'd be a lot of them.
-Monty Python, Life of Brian
I had to kick off this post with an inappropriate movie quote because I've been having a lot of inappropriate thoughts about Christmas. If you're offended by religious humor, stop reading. Well actually, you probably quit after the movie quote, so if that was okay, then press on! When you've spent the year thinking of nothing but babies babies babies, it's bound to intrude sometimes when you don't want it to... like during church. Most of those times involve me crying for no particular reason (Silent Night makes me bawl now. For that matter, seeing the Holiday Train on the way home from work makes me bawl.) but that doesn't make for an interesting blog post. So instead I'm going to share random bits of my internal monologue during church over the last few weeks. Don't judge me!
- I never noticed before how much Christmas was about babies.
- There is no way I would ride a donkey if I was pregnant. That just seems... bumpy.
- I never thought I'd be jealous of Mary because she had a baby.
- What if Mary had a miscarriage? Or an ectopic pregnancy?! Wow, women must have just died of ectopic pregnancies back then. Obviously Jesus was going to be okay, of course.
- Why didn't anyone at the inn volunteer to let Mary and Joseph have their room? I totally would have given up my room for a woman going into labor at any minute.
- What did Jesus' DNA look like? (Once a few years ago I attended a church service where the pastor referred to Jesus' brother James as his half-brother... "same mom, different dads." Uh, what? That opened a whole new can of metaphysical worms I'd never considered before.)
Yep, I knew Christmas would be hard this year. Our first baby would have been 3 months old by now. My sister is 25 weeks pregnant. I've been dreading the awkward questions of relatives for the last, oh, 25 weeks. So I'm going to cut myself some slack for coveting the baby Jesus. Even though it's a sin.