Moms and dads with their little ones are lined up for pictures with Santa.
Smiling arm-in-arm couples watch their children hop about on snowflakes which twirl about on the floor, their images projected from high in the rafters.
Exquisitely decorated, soon to be auctioned, Christmas trees line the pavilion where husbands and wives consider their bids.
Happiness, joy, and wonder are everywhere.
So why, pretending to look at the program, am I trying to hide my tears?
Because the haunting, melancholy, wistful words of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” are playing.
And this year she won’t be home.
For those of us who for the first time, or the second, or what seems like forever, won’t have our loved one home after all, but only in our dreams, the emotional heart strings stretch to near breaking.
Whether it’s Bing Crosby’s famous rendition of the most requested song at Christmas U.S.O.’s – when the soldiers of World War II learned they would not be home for Christmas; or saying the two most difficult words in any language at the bedside of a dear loved one who is leaving for the final time, home is where the heart longs to be.
With perhaps his signature “I’ll be Home for Christmas”, Crosby was said to have accomplished more for military morale than anyone else of that era. As it turns out, the tender place touched in the hearts of Americans, both soldiers and civilians, who were then in the depths of the war, was also the reason the astronauts of Gemini 7, in December of 1965, requested NASA Mission Control to have that very tune played as they returned home from the longest flight in the U.S. space program.
With all the technological advancement and engineering sophistication that can permit highly-trained specialists piloting spacecraft to hurtle through the darkness for the first ever rendezvous somewhere in outer space, yet there’s a stronger pull and deeply embedded something that tugs at the heart – hardwired for home.
When families normally gather for the traditional wide-eyed children’s unwrapping of gifts, followed by the laughter that will ring from the walls even long after the last piece of pie and all have returned to their own homes, it will not be without tears for a home-going of a different kind.
‘The back-eddies of the flowing river reflected our tears, the drooping willows – on which we hung our harps – matched our spirits,’ describes the Israeli captives in Babylon of ancient history as they thought of home.
There is – always has been and always will be throughout history wherever people walking this planet find themselves at this most poignant time of the year – within the human heart a homing-device and it is always drawing, forever tugging, and faithfully leading us home.
