This I Believe

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I believe in the joy of anticipation. I believe at least half the pleasure of every good thing in life is looking forward to it.

Anticipation is the smell of warm bread, promising that the loaf is worth waiting for, and the held breath while the present is unwrapped. It's making plans and lists with a tremble of excitement. Anticipation is the spiritual creation before the physical. 

There's no better season for anticipation than Christmas because it starts early and builds up gradually. September cools and fades into October. Halloween candy and decorations fill the shelves at Wal-Mart, there's a giant cardboard box of pumpkins in front of the grocery store, and every autumnal bit of it sets visions of sugarplums dancing in my head. As holidays go, Halloween is fine, but its real virtue is as a signal that Christmas is coming. The excitement builds like a balloon being slowly filled with helium until it lifts me off the ground. 

Life is full of wonderful things—beautiful moments, glimpses of joy, or just plain fun. But the truth is that most of those things only last a little while. Birthdays last one day (it's right there in the name!). A vacation might last a week. Christmas presents are unwrapped in minutes. But anticipation lets us stretch a single beautiful day into weeks or months of enjoyment. 

Some people like surprises. I like them too, as long as I know they're coming. It's not as much of a contradiction as it sounds. Think of a wrapped present. It's the perfect surprise—you know it exists, but you don't know what's inside. It teases you. It invites you to guess and stirs up hopes and wild suppositions. And the longer it sits there, the more the suspense builds, a kind of pleasant pain you never want to end. 

Most things we look forward to leave a kind of sadness behind once they're fulfilled. We all recognize that hollow feeling that comes when we go to bed on Christmas. In a song by one of my son's favorite bands, a man mourning a breakup describes himself as "empty like the day after Christmas." The truth is that in this mortal existence, everything ends. But God has blessed us with seasons, beautiful things that come around over and over. December twenty-sixth is too soon to start planning for the next Christmas, but before we know it, it's October first again, time to think about candy canes and cookie dough fudge. 

When my children were small, we watched the animated adventures of a child-like talking dog named Kipper. In his Christmas story, Kipper ponders this important question: "Which is best, I wonder, Christmas or Christmas Eve? Presents or expecting presents?" Christmas Eve is the ultimate symbol of anticipation. The thing we've been waiting for is close enough to smell but still out of reach. 

Perhaps in Heaven, we'll live eternally at the perfect moment where anticipation touches fulfillment, and we'll have the joy of both. Until then, I choose Christmas Eve over Christmas, every single time.

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