WATCHING
“What is ‘pout’?”
“Pout?”
“Like in the song, ‘You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout…”
What’s ‘pout’?”
“Pout… well…” She had to think for a moment. It was one of those words you knew
until your seven year-old son asks you what it means. “Pout is making a face to show that you
are unhappy or mad.”
“What kind of face?” he asked looking across the table.
“Like this.” She pushed her lips out and narrowed her eyes. “Or like this.” She jumped
up and went over to the counter to get a magazine with Donald Trump’s picture on the cover,
the President-elect’s face in a perfect pout, lips forward, eyes narrowed.
He looked at the picture, then back at his mother, who made her pout-face again. “And
Santa Claus doesn’t like a pout face?” he asked quietly. “If I pout he’ll think I’m bad and won’t
come.”
His little brow wrinkled up, and she could see that he was worried. “It’s just a song,
honey.”
“But is pouting naughty, not nice?”
“Not really. Anyway, sometimes you can’t help it. Something bothers you and before
you know it you have a pout-face. It just happens”
“And why is crying bad?”
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“It’s not bad. Sometimes you get sad or upset and you cry. It happens to us all.”
”But the song says that Santa doesn’t like it when you cry or pout.” He gave this further
thought. “Why do I have to watch out if pouting is something that just happens? It seems
mean.”
“It’s just a song. There’s more to Santa than that silly song. Don’t pay any attention to
it.”
But that wasn’t so easy to do. In the days leading up to Christmas, the song was
everywhere—on the radio and TV and in all the stores, even at the supermarket. It made him
nervous to think that Santa was always watching—even when he was asleep—just waiting for
him to slip up. What if he pouted when he was sleeping? And what was “better be good for
goodness sake”? What did that mean? What did Santa want from him?
One night, a week before Christmas he woke up in a cold sweat. He had dreamed that
eyes were everywhere watching him, circling above his bed, coming at him from every side,
mean eyes laughing at him. He threw off the covers and ran crying to his mother’s room and
leaped into her bed. She woke with a start and cried “Joey” at the same instant he cried
“Mommy”, and she pulled him under the covers with her and held him close until he stopped
crying and shaking and finally fell asleep. Lying next to him and listening to him breathe, she
decided she’d take a personal day at work and keep him home tomorrow. It would be nice to
have the day together.
She let him sleep in the next morning, and when he awoke, they made pancakes
together and drizzled them with Aunt Nancy’s fresh-from-the-tree maple syrup. He told her
about his nightmare as they ate, and she wracked her brain for a better Christmas story than
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the one the song told. She suggested he go play with his Legos while she washed and put away
the breakfast dishes. He was such a good kid, and it broke her heart to see him do distressed.
Going through the living room on her way to take a shower she saw that her son was
using his Legos to copy the crèche they had set up on the floor a few days ago. The set had
been in the family for a long time and it was a tender reminder of a season which didn’t always
seem so tender anymore. Putting out the crèche was something they did together, mostly
without comment, to mark the coming of Christmas.
“Watcha up to, buddy?” she asked, kneeling down next to him.
“I’m making a barn for all these people and animals.”
She examined his structure. “Your barn is really nice. Much nicer than the other one.”
“I don’t have a Lego baby. Is it okay if I use that one?” he asked pointing into the
crèche.
“Sure, why not?”
“I’m going to put him up on the second floor where he’ll be safe.”
“And more comfortable, too, I’ll bet. Nice and warm.”
He placed the manger in his building and began poking through the mound of blocks on
the floor for some Lego figures to place near the baby. “Why is the baby in a barn anyway?” he
asked. “It’s not good for a baby to be in a barn? He could get stepped on by a cow. And
there’s all kinds of germs.”
“Yes, well, I guess there wasn’t much choice. All the rooms in town were taken, and his
parents didn’t have much money, so they had to make do with what was available. Too bad
they didn’t have you to build a nice place for them.”
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“Anything could happen to a baby in a barn,” he said, as he arranged the Lego figures
around the manger.
“That’s true, but the baby had his mom and dad to watch over him… And God.”
She rarely spoke the word “God” unless she spoke it “in vain”. Why did she bring God
into the picture? She hadn’t given any thought to God for a long time and, if asked, she
couldn’t say what she believed. Not much, really.
“God’s watching over the baby,” he said with more assurance than she had, and he
started to construct a roof over the baby’s head.
“Yes,” she said, not quite knowing what it was she was agreeing to, wondering where he
had gotten any of this from.
He turned to her and said, “So is God like Santa?” She could see his eyes clouding with
worry. “You know, watching all the time, knowing whether you’ve been bad or good.”
“No, not like Santa,” she said quickly. “That’s not the way God is. It’s more like God is
with the baby, you know, loving the baby the way mommies love their babies. And God is in
the mommies, too, loving them,” she added. ”God is love,” she added to that, and on and on
she went, telling him the Nativity story as she remembered it, and moving all the figures out of
the crèche and over to the Lego barn. He helped her arrange them and added a few more of
his Lego figures. “It’s not a scary watching, honey. It’s a watching that’s all full of love.” She
didn’t know if she believed a word she was saying, but she didn’t want her sweet boy to be
anxious or afraid.
He continued to build, as she watched. He gave the barn a roof and a courtyard for
people who were coming to see the baby. She slid back on the floor and rested her back
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against the sofa, enjoying the sight of him at work, perplexed at her sudden lapse into
religiosity and what it meant that this is where she had gone in the face of her son’s distress.
Every once in a while he would throw out another question, mostly about the characters in the
crèche scene but also wanting to know how she knew that God was watching over things the
way she said.
“I just do,” she replied. It wasn’t much of an answer, the kind of answer she hated when
she was a child, but it was the best she could do at the moment. She got up and went to her
desk to check her computer to see what was coming at her from the office. There were a dozen
emails that needed her attention. And she had a report to finish. But first a shower. She stood
up and walked over and kissed her son on the top of the head, then went off to the bathroom
to mull over how it was she had suddenly become the house theologian.
In a few minutes, dried and dressed, she returned to the living room to find the boy still
hard at work, having added a tower on one corner of the barn and dragged the poinsettia plant
to the construction site where the great crimson blooms towered over the barn.
“That’s beautiful, honey,” she said. “And the big tree adds a lot.”
“This, mom?” he asked pointing to the plant. “It’s not a tree.”
“Oh, sorry, I thought it was a tree.”
“Nope,” he said, his head tilted, surveying his work. “That’s God… watching.” Amen.
Christmas Day, 2016
Emanuel Lutheran Church
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