Atomic Monster Cafe: My 60th Christmas...

...is in the books...and for whatever confluence of reasons this was perhaps my most reflective.

Spent some time thinking about all the Christmas days that have gone before...and it's odd, but for as much fanfare as the day gets, it's surprising how few of them I really remember...for the most part they all kind of blend together.

Does that happen to you? If you've only had ten or fifteen of them, I suppose you can probably keep them in order...but 60...well, that seems like a pretty big number to me.

There's the one in Texas when we actually had snow...

...first time I'd ever seen the white stuff...so cold on my bare hands it almost felt like a burn...and the one, still in Texas, when I discovered Santa Claus...

...was just a pleasant fiction told to naive and trusting children...you mean there's no jolly toy maker arriving on the rooftop...

...in his sleigh pulled by reindeer? Not a happy day...

And there's the one in Pennsylvania when I was ten and fascinated with the amazing Jim Thorpe...

...I had to have a real "pigskin" like he used...one without white stripes at either end.

Mom and Dad came through and I kept that ball for another fifteen years until it was so smooth I had to treat the leather with brown shoe polish to get a grip on it.

A couple of years later in Massachusetts I received a coveted Rock'em Sock'em Robots game...

...and that was a big deal because the "the magic window" was rapidly closing - that special golden age of childhood...the years from 7 to 12 when - if you're fortunate - you're under the care of parents that love and provide for you and you get to experience a few happy, carefree years.

For the next ten years Christmas arrived with a vague sense of longing for that which seemed lost forever...we moved to Maine, I finished high school, went off to college, started a career...welcome to adulthood.

Then in my mid twenties, married and a father of two, I had an encounter with my Savior...and suddenly Christmas took on a new meaning. It was no longer just lights and glitter and decorations and gifts...

...it now meant the birth of our Savior and the gift of eternal life in the person of the Bethlehem baby.

But the crush of every day life and the tyranny of the urgent have a tendency to push the important things aside. Couple that with a job that caters to the retail industry - where for two months of the year everyone worships at the altar of commercialism and insanity prevails - and too many Christmases have raced by in a blur, stacked up and forgotten like so much dried cord wood.

I'm finally ready to change that. Yes, it's late in the game, but time hasn't expired...yet.

Don't know how many more revolutions around the sun I get, but I know it's one less than I had last year.

So I'm going to work on owning my time and spending however much I have left doing things that matter with good people I like.

And that's going to include making the most of important celebrations like Christmas.

I suppose that's pretty close to a New Year's resolution, isn't it?