Bring The SCOOP Home for Christmas

There is probably no other time of the year when the yearning for home is greater than that which is almost upon us: Christmas and the number of other celebrations and festivities that overlap or follow this holiday. Many of the spiritual values that are the essence of the Christian origin of Christmas are synonymous with home: birth, family, giving, simplicity, sharing. These are of course universal values, that all of us share, regardless of faith, origin, creed, or wealth. The quest for the perfect, newest cell phone to offer as a gift is not among those values, but the experience does seem to have become an unfortunate part of the human condition! Thankfully not on the same level as going home, or hoping to do so, or, in too many cases, just hoping to have a home.

It’s probably fitting, at a time when sharing should be the main waypoint of our moral compass, to think about that hope: to have a home. Homelessness seems to be strictly an urban problem, and most of us, readers and contributors to this paper, live at several removes from the city. We don’t walk or drive past beggars or street kids on a regular basis. We rarely meet people who are so far from home, they can only rarely, if ever, go back. Yet many of us are struggling to find or keep a decent home, as one of this issue’s main articles reminds us. As we get older, and all too often lonelier, sharing the place we call home is often the best solution, as another of our writers points out. And of course, home is often more an experience than a place, shared with the people and animals we love, and with those we’ve loved and lost, as Terry Sprague tells us, in the beautiful, powerful prose we’ve grown accustomed to.

As Christmas approaches, we think Edith Sitwell had it right when she asserted that “Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.”