'Tis the Season

‘Tis the season for God to show his children love; it’s also the occasion for us to show one another love. It’s a beautiful thing for people to publicly express love to their loved ones, however they do it. Giving gifts during the Christmas season is a form of PDA that isn’t tawdry.

People with great means give greater gifts than the ones who have fewer resources. I enjoy watching the commercial of a guy who got a Big Wheel when he was a boy and considered it great until years later his wife gave him a Lexus. I enjoy watching the photo session in the morning when the couple are in the PJ’s, walking around the car and taking pictures. Isn’t it a thing of beauty that brings us the kind of joy that has the resonance of eternity?

We should not envy the guy that got a Lexus; what ought to cause us envy is that his wife, or girl friend, loved him so much that she exhausted her means to buy him the best possible gift to express the depth of her love for him. That was indeed a good and beautiful thing.

In our household Kathy is the one who makes everyone’s Christmas. What is lacking in quality she tries to make it up in quantity in her gift purchasing for her four men. Our boys are grown yet they don’t seem to have grown out of their yearning for good gifts during Christmas. We are people of little means but we are pretty resourceful in showing love to one another. Kathy started gathering gifts for this Christmas well over a month ago and has visited “Dollar Tree” many times to increase the volume of gifts under the shiny tree. We started opening the gifts at about nine and didn’t end until three in the afternoon. Rob the “mailman” did a good job and prolonged the joy of our gift-opening until we were a little exhausted.

I put away the gifts that I received in a drawer and some of them may stay there for a long time, but I will have great difficulty shelving away the love that I have received from my loved ones, for I will need that when times are hard and my days become a little dreary during the coming year.


The cardigan that I ordered for Kathy was about a size too big and the jumper that she asked for turned out to be a size too small, and the poem I tried to write for her was only half-done, but all was forgiven. A Chinese man was giving his friend a goose, but it got away on the way there and he only had a feather to show for it when he got to his friend’s house, but his friend comforted him by saying: “You traveled many mile to delivered this goose feather; the gift is light, but your love for me is very heavy.” (千里送鵝毛, 禮輕情意重) I guess my love for my wife was weighty enough for her not to mock my awkwardness in gift-giving.

Holiday Blues

We have holiday blues because we have too much hope for life, too lofty of an expectation for joy and, instinctively, we know that this coming holiday season will bring more disappointment than excitement, like all the other ones in the past. Yet we continue to wait eagerly for the coming of Christmas and the New Year, thinking this season will be entirely different.

Things that cause us to have great hope and never fail to disappoint us in the end are not the best things in life. They are secondary at best. Therefore we continue to wait for the best thing to arrive in our life, and many of us will die waiting.

The key to our happiness in life is not to have such great expectations. Well, to be more exact, not to stake our happiness on secondary things and learn to explore the best things that brings us true joy. We need to cultivate our talent for happiness by searching for joy among the common things during ordinary days. If we wait until a holiday to be happy we probably won’t find it.

When I was a child, it was such a depressing feeling after I spent the last dime that I had received in my Chinese New Year “red envelope” It made me wonder whether it was worth it, because the feeling of disappointment seemed to outweigh the excitement of receiving the money. Yet I continued to wait for the coming of Chinese New Year, year after year, believing things would be different every year, though they remained the same.

I have since found a good solution. I have tried to make everyday a Christmas, a Chinese new year, and a red-letter day. If life is a gift from above, we don’t have to set aside a special day during the year to have a great celebration, do we? It’s akin to opening up a gift when I look at the sparrows feeding in the birdfeeder outside of our dining room window and the joy it brings may be one of the best things in life. Our life will be filled with unspeakable joy if we consider each day of our life God’s gift, loaded with colorful packages of goodies waiting to be opened. How can we not be overcome with euphoria when we unwrap the glorious gift of the sunrise every morning? The only reason that we don’t is because we don’t think it is a gift from God. Without realizing this, your life will become “always winter, but never Christmas.”

Birthday Lamentation

I think it was Confucius who made a cruel statement that if a man hasn’t accomplished anything significant at age fifty, it would be pretty hopeless for him to ever achieve anything with his life. It’s depressing to be reminded of this on my birthday. I turned fifty-six a few days ago.

I spent the entire time waiting for something great to happen during my birthday, but nothing occurred except a phone call from Rob and by the time Kathy came home from work, I was getting a little depressed. I always knew that I wasn’t all that important of a person to other people, and the truth was again confirmed. Nobody thought about me during the day except my loved ones, which wasn’t quite enough for me, I suppose.

Why wasn’t it enough? I asked. I guess there is indeed a great discrepancy between how I perceive myself and how other people perceive me, and the key to my mental well-being and personal happiness is to narrow that gap as much as possible. If I considered myself unimportant, I probably wouldn’t mind as much how insignificant other people deem me to be. Our self-perception does determine the way we react to people’s perception of us.

Why did it matter, really? After a hearty meal at River Smith’s I was golden again, and a couple of presents from my wife gave my morale a big boost. We tend to become dejected if we focus too much on ourselves. The key for us, it appears to me, to become helpful to others is to become forgetful of ourselves. As I age, I have become more and more aware of my limitations as a man and my inability to achieve greatness in life. But there are still a lot of small things that I can still do to achieve smallness – true greatness. Emily Dickinson was on target when she wrote:

“If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

May this sentimental little poem serve as a reminder for all of us - We can still achieve true greatness by doing small things for other people, as my father-in-law used to do: He went through his church directory everyday and sang “happy birthday” to the ones who might have been forgotten by the entire world except one.

Truth Uncovered

“I was popular with girls when I was your age,” I often said to my boys, thus making fun of their lack of sugar & spice in their otherwise pretty colorful lives. Albeit they had great difficulty believing the validity of my claim, they had greater difficulty thinking that their honest father was a liar; therefore they continued to accept my statement begrudgingly until one day I slipped a little bit and the truth was revealed.

“I had a couple of dates with a beautiful bus conductor when I was in the service, but she dumped me after that,” I said to William.

“O yeah, she dumped you?” William sensed an opportunity to uncover the truthfulness of my boast in the past.

“No big deal. She left because her brother didn’t like me.” I tried to patch up the hole that I had poked with an alibi.

“Her brother? I can’t believe that,” he continued to taunt and I became speechless. I guess I really wasn’t all that popular with the opposite sex. I was fortunate to have a few dates in my twenties, not because I was that eligible, I was merely not all that selective.

I didn’t mean to insult my children or make fun of them for not having girlfriends. As a matter of fact, I admire them for not chasing whomever happens to come along. I was mentally unhealthy as a young man and the feeling of inferiority caused me to search for someone to compensate for my dreadful inadequacy. I felt so incomplete then that I seemed to always need a girl to complete my being. That was the sole reason that I always needed someone by my side. To a certain extent, I was a fearful little boy and the few girlfriends I have had were my security blankets.

We need to be happy with ourselves before we can make other people happy. Those who seek a significant other to make their lives more fulfilled or joyful will be sorely disappointed, and the relationship that they end up having will eventually become too suffocating to bear. The ones who are miserable being single will become doubly miserable being coupled. “Two are better than one,” says Ecclesiastes, but the sum total of two people’s problems are obviously greater than just one person’s difficulties and are much tougher to handle. We should be more prepared to be someone’s spouse so that we will bring less baggage into our marital relationship, and not having random dates and casual relationships is a good start.

Phoenix and Dragon

“The phoenix and the dragon are a perfect match,” goes a Chinese saying, meaning people should marry to someone of their own sociological, intellectual, and cultural rank to guarantee a happy marriage. I don’t think I totally agree with this notion. Opposites attract, so we have an inclination to find someone completely different from us. In my case, I honestly did not have a clear picture concerning my future mate when I was young and foolish. I had no idea what I wanted in a mate, but I surely knew the ones to whom I didn’t want. My chauvinistic idea wouldn’t allow me to marry someone better than me, so it was never a part of my plan to marry someone who was taller or smarter than me, let alone to a woman who was not of my own race. Before I met my future wife I didn’t have to worry about that because I was relatively tall as an Asian and intelligence wise, I wasn’t too shabby either.

As you can see, Kathy is “slightly” taller than me and her IQ is probably 20 points above mine. I barely beat the curve in my testing but she is inching toward the genius level. I was greatly intimidated by her queenly status and dwarfed by her intellectual ability the first time we met and it took me three plus years to ask her out and, up to this day, I still wonder how in the world I mustered enough courage to ask for the hand of someone who was in all ways superior to me. Was I trying to prove the old Chinese saying wrong? I was more of a lizard than a dragon, but Kathy was unquestionably a phoenix. Twenty-eighty years of blessed marriage later, I still look at myself in the mirror with amazement and ask: “What have you done to deserve such good fortune?”

I have done nothing, really. I did have a perfect Matchmaker who made all the difference. With his intervention and supernatural maneuvering the impossible became possible and the unthinkable happened during a midsummer night when a beautiful fairy fell in love with a man with a mule’s head. I guess you know the rest of the story. What has happened to me merely affirms the idea that I hold to be true: a wife of noble character is given to us by God. Now you know what to do if you are still in the process of finding the right one. Worldly ideas and traditional beliefs concerning dating and courtship may or may not be applicable in your romantic pursuit. It matters very little whether you are a dragon or a lizard in people’s eyes; the thing for you to do is to go before the throne of grace and ask for advice and a helping hand from the One who really knows and has the power to assist you in your grandiose enterprise.

Romantic Love

I wonder when exactly was the first time my mother and father saw each other. Was it their wedding day? That would have been pretty awkward, wouldn’t it? They weren’t prepared to be married at such young age, yet, as far I could tell, their marriage worked out just fine. It lasted close to sixty years, until my dad passed away about two years ago. Was there romance in their marriage? I believe so. Did they ever consider splitting up when things weren’t going so well? I doubt it ever happened. “Sharing a bed together for one night should last for one hundred generations.” What does this Chinese saying mean? Who knows? People in the old days might not have known what true love was, but they sure did take romantic love a lot more seriously than we do. Consequently, their relationships lasted a lot longer than most of ours.

It takes both powerful emotion and strong will to love. The former involves our feelings and the latter our commitment. Romantic love will always have its ups and downs and the feelings lovers have toward each other often go through ebbs and flows, but there should be one constant that doesn’t change - commitment. Not only do we commit to the one we love, we also commit to the One who makes love possible. I can assure you that your love will last if you commit to both of the above.

To love is the easiest thing to do; yet it can also be the hardest. It does give us unimaginable joy, but it may also demand the sacrifice of our whole being. It’s rewarding as well as demanding. Do not rush into a relationship, for the essence of romantic love is its inevitability and all you need is one true love. You will know it for sure when it occurs, but your love probably won’t last beyond your erotic feeling for each other if you merely fall in love with love, or with something else.

By the way, the romantic love between my parents seemed to start out with an unyielding commitment to each other and ended with powerful feelings of affection, which goes to show that dating as we know it may not be necessary. In fact, I am often tempted to take matters into my own hands and do a little match-making for my boys. It may work out just fine like it did with my parents.

Turkey Bowl

At least one of my readers was curious about the result of the Sea Family Annual Turkey Bowl. Well, being a humble man, I wasn’t going to post the outcome of our glorious conquest over the mighty Michael & William, but being a caring man, I really hated to disappoint the insatiable desire that some of you have for information. Therefore I decided to publish the score of our highly contested two-on-two non-tackle football game held before our Thanksgiving feast, consisting of a sixteen-pound turkey with all the trimmings provided by the world- renowned chef, Mother Sea. Well, without further ado, let me just unveil the results: Robert & Rob defeated William & Michael soundly and snapped a five-year losing streak by the score of seven to five. To my great surprise Michael, being a fierce competitor, was a gracious loser who didn’t make a big fuss after the game, but William kept saying that he wasn’t one hundred percent and, for some odd reason, he developed some sort of “throw pock” during the game, making his passes less than perfect. We did have a ref and a cheerleader who called the game and made a holding call in our favor and awarded us fifteen yards. The problem was when the score was six to five she wanted to call the game, but we insisted on playing to seven. She then threw down the whistle and walked to the car and refused to call the rest of the game. I guess she was in the tank for her elderly husband and was worrying about Rob’s well being, since he was so out of shape that he had to rest for a few seconds after every play. Well, being old and out of shape didn’t really affect our performance at all, and youth and vitality didn’t guarantee victory for the other team either. All in all, it was a good day for the geezers. By the way, Rob still defeated Michael in the post-game sprint by a nose and, business as usual, I came in last, even with a sizeable head start. I dug real hard, but still didn’t go that fast. Such is the curse of aging, I guess.

P.S. The Guru will have something about romantic love in his next post. Wait and see what he has to say about this hot topic