The Christmas Red Zone

SUE JANE SULLIVAN

A Sunday of NFL football means that the phrase “red zone” is within earshot when in and out of the living room. Once a team reaches the opponent’s 20-yard-line, it is within twenty yards of the endzone. Scoring opportunities are within grasp.

We are approaching Christmas’s red zone. Less than two weeks to scamper down the aisles to score last-minute deals.

The Dallas Cowboys—or whoever your team of choice is—are not going to get points on every red zone visit. The Christmas red zone works the same way, and not just when it comes to finding shopping bargains.

Rude customers and demanding bosses during these next few days can kill a promising drive. Last-minute assignments to work overtime in retail or pull another shift in a hospital or on an oil rig deflates even the jolliest of moods.

You may be in a situation where money is tight and gifts are scarce. The holidays do not exempt us from a broken-down vehicle or a broken heart. Custody battles over small children and battles over where our adult children will spend the holidays are magnified in December.

There simply is no sure way to “score” a Merry Christmas, as Mary and Joseph discovered after a long journey and nowhere to stay.

In the midst of the holiday chaos, try to give yourself the gift of a few moments alone. Read or say a short prayer. Take deep breaths and exhale slowly. Make a genuine effort to look at another person and smile. Be mindfully engaged with goodness which may present itself in something as simple as a beautiful Christmas carol on the radio. In small but meaningful ways, these actions might help you get through the red zone.

December 25, 2023, will once again be without peace on earth. We can find some inner peace, however, to help bring light to the darkness.

NEXT WEEK, I will be traveling by train to spend Christmas with my older daughter. Riding the rails during the holidays is 1940s and ’50s movie material, don’t you think? When you watch “White Christmas,” cue the train scene, and think of this small-town Texas grandmother heading not to a small Vermont inn but to a North Carolina beach town.

CheckYourMirrorswillreturninJanuary.

Snyder, Texas, native Sue Jane Sullivan is a retired schoolteacher whose thought-provoking commentary appears occasionally in several West Texas newspapers, including The Texas Spur and The Caprock Courier.