The meaning of Christmas is ...

Advent was once the countdown clock to Christmas. The meaning of Christmas, for this formerly religious kid, was mystery crystallized in liturgy compounded by anticipation: Christmas eve eucharist and lots of kick-ass gifts.

This year TWIL and I shopped and packed and shipped and ducked out in time to get to family early. We left Massachusetts - our friends and their new babies, our childless friends and their peaceful living rooms. We cut out on the other parents who, because they love us, they didn't say "disappointed" about our absences. We left our own home, the place where I do my work and TWIL recovers from hers. The one true home today.... It was a big fat sacrifice, okay?! Ho, ho, ho.

But, of course, there were gifts. This year, TWIL's mom and stepdad gave us a night in a lodge at the South rim of the Grand Canyon. We hiked two miles down a trail the first afternoon and were back in time for a cloudy sunset and a terrific meal at El Tovar, the singular inn on the rim. The next morning we hiked miles down the South Kaibab trail in the snow. The beauty and the altitude took our breaths away. Had that morning been the end of Christmas, I'd have had mystery and kick ass gifts. Satisfied. But it seemed it would not end.

We returned for cooking and baking. While the oven worked, we dug a foxhole on the living room and established an entertainment beachhead for the great movies of the holiday, including some first-time viewings of the lesser greats: The Bishop's Wife, Tenth Avenue Angel, Little Women (with June Allyson and Elizabeth Taylor), Meet Me in St. Louis (no, not the first viewing of this florid holiday wallpaper).

On St. Stephen's Day, we road tripped to Scottsdale to visit Taliesin West. TWIL and I have an ongoing fascination with Frank Lloyd Wright, your father's modernist. When we get the chance, we visit his standing works. His Arizona architecture lab shares the dignity and calm of other works, but this is still a school.

The buildings are less formal and more purposeful. It helps to know FLW's father was a preacher and musician; the architect was a missionary and a zealot. Taliesin E/W were his monasteries and ashrams (without the complication of vows of celibacy). In the desert, he found inspiration. His buildings look like landscape, and the steady flow of school fees and stone-hauling students must have steadied him. When he died, we were told, he had 168 projects in process.

Christmas no longer stands for mystery and tradition. This year, its meaning lay in our reunion with family and the delight in new experience - the desert is also lovely, dark, and deep. What is the meaning of Christmas? To find light in darkness. It's in there somewhere. You look while I play with my kick-ass gifts.

What is a word that rhymes with "stuck" and means real estate agent?

For rehearsal dinner - cue the Sweeney Todd music - we're roasting real estate agent on a spit over a crackling fire of burning lawyers. Be careful of the flaring flames! That's brimstone.

On Sunday, while so many of our good friends were chatting and drinking and eating at our holiday open house, the Real Estate Agent called (REA). We were cuddling other's babies and pouring more chardonnay. This is the guy who showed us Seaside because it was place where the owner allowed people to hold events. Who assured us repeatedly that the size of our wedding wasn't too large.

When I discovered the message on Monday, this is what I heard.

"Uh, yeah, John. Matt Ball here [REA. Probably not his real name. Because why flame the guy, right? Oh, who am I kidding? That's his name, the no-good rhymes-with-stuck]. I just talked to the owner of the Seaside place and he's -- I dunno, I guess he's been talking to people. About liability and stuff like that. I dunno. I tried to tell him it'd be okay and umm. I dunno. He's just not, you know.... I'm gunna check out another place that probably won't work, so give me a call."

No apology, regrets, leads, or other ideas. But then on Monday.

J: "Matt, this is not good. We've spent a couple months planning, sending tent companies to measure. There's no way?"

M: "Uhh, no. No." [Sssssss. That's the sound of cell phone signals hissing through towers and bouncing off Cape Cod lighthouses.]

J: "I'm really disappointed. What can we do?"

M: "Uhhh. [Sssssss.]

J: "Okay, I'm speechless now. I mean, that's it? What about other places?"

M: "Oh, oh. there's another five-bedroom, but the side yard is all trees. I'll check it out for you."

J: "Matt, you told us this place was open to weddings. You've been talking to the owner for nearly two months. What happened? I mean I'm speechless. What the heck?"

M: "[Sssssss.]"

The silence grows and expands and takes in all of desultory work he has done for us, the calls returned late or not at all, the glib reassurances, the thinly veiled efforts to help us help him get a commission, the feeling that if we're fish in a barrel you could at least have the courtesy to shoot us because we're dying of suffocation now.

All I wanted was a shallow acknowledgment that we'd invested our wedding hopes in the place. That I would be feeling pretty pissed about the snatch and grab of 63 Seaside. A little false boot-licking, maybe, which I thought was part of the REA licensing exam. A nod to human feeling of any kind would have been welcome.

M: "[Sssssss.]"

J: "Matt? Hello, Matt?"

M: "Uhh. I'm gunna check that other place, so...."

J: "Okay, good. That's great. You keep on it. Thanks. Thanks."

But all's well that ends well. Next year, TWIL and I will be married and Matt Ball will still be a real estate agent.

Did I mention how much I like the house in Pocasset? How beautiful the lawn? How rare the natural chapel of spruce in front? Oh, I will. I will.