Christmas on a Sunday is, in fact, not all that rare an event. There is a 28 year cycle and the gap between Sunday Christmas’ varies (due to leap years) from 11 to 5 years in a predictable way. The next one will be in 2016 and the one after in 2022. (I did not do the math myself. Check with Ask.com.) Still…

It feels just slightly more special. In some ways (purely temporal) it complicates the day. In some (mostly spiritual) it elevates it. But of course I profess to believe that for people of faith there is, or should be, no such dichotomy. The spiritual finds expression in the temporal or it does not exist at all. When all our moments are moments in eternity, in the presence of the divine, then we are living our faith.

And, in that spirit, I am not exactly certain why this is my Christmas Sunday pic. It was taken yesterday, on Christmas Eve Saturday, along my little stretch of the Kennebunk Bridle Trail where so many of my local pics are taken. We had an unusually high tide which flooded the marsh with salt water, so that the fresh water spread thin on the surface and froze to an icy lace. As the tide fell, the fragile skin of ice bent and broke around things as delicate as individual grass stalks, creating impromptu sculptures to catch the clear December light. I attempted to memorialize the effect in frames of various sizes. This one, at full zoom, is one of my favorites.

Maybe that is it. If light is spiritual and water temporal (as we often draw the lines), this image represents the fusion of the two, and just how fragile and fleeting our attempts to see them so too often are. Rare as a Sunday Christmas…but beautiful enough for memory…and frequent enough, the sweep of time, for hope.

Today I celebrate the birth of Jesus, Son of God, God with us, God in us, who through life and death and life beyond death, gives us life…today and forever…like, in some way, the clear light of December caught in fragments of ice on a falling tide. A thing of beauty and wonder worth celebrating.

Merry Christmas. Happy Sunday.