I'm Dreaming of a Green Christmas

“I’M DREAMING OF A GREEN CHRISTMAS”

            My sister and I used to look at each other longingly and croon, “I’m dreaming of a green Christmas” as we drove through the countryside surrounding Los Banos, on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley.  We watched “White Christmas” as often as it came on television in the 1970’s.  We, too, longed to see “the tree tops glisten” with snow, instead of the view from the backseat of our wood-paneled station wagon: alternating pasturelands of cattle and sheep, grazing on the green winter grass of our cow town.

            As much as I dreamed of “A White Christmas”, it never happened for me.  I grew up, got married and moved 70 miles across the flat valley floor to Fresno, on the east side of the great San Joaquin Valley.  Now, I look out the driver’s seat window of my car at alternating pasturelands for cattle and sheep, grazing on the green winter grass of central California’s hill country.

            Our family would often choose one night of the Thanksgiving weekend to have dinner at the Chalet Basque Restaurant in Los Banos.  It was a very unpretentious place.  Each red-checkered oil cloth-topped table had a simple, cheap milk glass vase filled with dusty plastic flowers.  Basque restaurants were fixtures in Los Banos because of its  history of sheep herding.  The Basque shepherds had come to America from their homes in the mountains between Spain and France.  They worked in the hill country around Los Banos, especially in the remote, desert-like Panoche Hills, between Los Banos and Firebaugh.  When families like ours ate at a Basque restaurant, we were separate from the indigent shepherd population, for whom this was everyday home-cooking.  We were happy to enjoy our hearty fare of salads, stews and roasts, apart from these men, who were just a step above “homeless” in social prestige.  They lived much of the year in little tiny trailers that dotted the surrounding hills, watching the sheep and wrapping up in the warmth of a sarape at night.  They really were not the kind of men that middle-class American mothers would want their daughters to socialize with.

            I don’t know exactly when I woke up to the realization that these were exactly the kind of men that God chose to reveal the glory of His Son’s royal birth to.  But, it was.  “Shepherds abiding in their fields” (no doubt wrapped in the Hebrew equivalent of a sarape!), “keeping watch over their flocks by night.”  And then I asked, “God, weren’t you taking a pretty big risk?  Entrusting the greatest truth of all time to men whose standing was just one rung above “homeless” on the social ladder? Who would believe them?”

            And then, the answer came: “Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?  For He grew up before Him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of parched ground; He has no stately form or majesty that we should look upon Him, nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him. He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, and like one from whom men hide their face, He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; but the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him.  He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet He did not open His mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that is silent before its shearers, so He did not open His mouth.”  Isaiah 53:1,2,3,6,7 (NASV)

--Posted by Mama O.