is presented with a handsome six-shooter, Christmas Eve, 1904, and in turn orders four suspended policemen reinstated at once.  All city prisoners are discharged.  Christmas crowds throng the Dallas downtown district.

When you visit family, you are something else.  You are not just that guy.  You are part of history.  You are those giant flame-shaped bulbs that would burn your hand if you touched them.  You are ornaments made in Occupied Japan.  You are part of the scenic wallpaper and the first family dog, a collie named Kola.  You are things forgotten and unsaid.  You have contributed to the way others see you and themselves.  You are even one source of opinions on a host of past and current issues, some with political connotations.  You are the result of a certain kind of child-rearing which the younger generation is avoiding at their peril or to their credit, depending on the prevailing point of view.

You are only a part, however.  You are not a separate entity.  Your edges are blurred; your boundaries overlap with those before and after you.  Younger members of the family make a gesture, use a turn of phrase and don't even realize they've evoked some long ago aunt or uncle they never knew.  Your sister on the phone sounds like your mother used to sound when you were kids.  You are not kids, but the voice reminds you that you were once.  You are careful what you let yourself remember at the happiest time of the year.

     Are those red and black cowboy gloves my brother is wearing?  Is this the year Howdy Doody shows up and scares me?  Why am I trying to look out the window or escape?  Is it Christmas Eve or Christmas morning and still dark?  Eisenhower is President, I know that.  The War going on is the Korean War.  There has always been a war going on.

Christmas in Dallas where my brother lives is an extraordinary adventure.  Everyone is on their best behavior but we are, gratefully, a good and decent and thoughtful family and so it isn't all that hard to be well-behaved.  If there is trouble in the world, it is in the past or outside the group of us.  My sister-in-law runs through our itinerary.  After Church and for the next twenty-four hours at least there will be visitors interspersed with the Opening of Presents alternating with Eating.  Mostly, she admits, we will be eating and opening presents.  It is simplicity itself.  What could be better?  I am thrilled. 

Church is not a mega-church either, although it is close enough.  I am prepared for a mega-church, mentally, and am looking forward to it.  I am up for anything in fact, not having been to a big or small one on Christmas for a very long time.  This church has seven Christmas Eve services one after the other, but it is not the kind where you are bussed in from the  parking lot like some of the really giant evangelical ones.  My niece belongs to the Highland Park Methodist where the President and First Lady are members (although they are at Camp David), but the rest of us attend the services in this other Methodist Church which is not the President's but not a mega-church either and not the one with the smiling minister who has been on Larry King, because he is in Houston, not Dallas.  There are cameras and video screens and lots of people but it is not like the churches I have seen on TV or in documentaries.  It is actually pretty much like the kind of church we went to when we were kids, except a whole lot bigger, and they have figured out how to put holes in the bottom of clear plastic cup holders for the candles instead of just risking fire with a wax-coated paper ring to protect your hand from the hot wax the way we used to get them in the old days.  Still, we never burned the church down, much as my father thought we would, giving children lighted candles a sign to him of not being in your right mind or having any sense.  In Dallas we sing and watch ourselves with our lighted candles held up on the giant screens on either side of the altar.  It is like being on TV, in a simulcast, singing Silent Night Holy Night.  It is beautiful.  I am impressed by all the families and all the children.  I am moved and shiver from effect of it all.  You can't help being moved. 

Christmas Day we expand beyond the family to include some neighbors.  The talk is sports and golf and the NFL, scores and skills.  We have already watched Chicago beat Green Bay, and I have already been driven past the lighted-up Gothic French Chateau Mansion of Greg Ellis, Dallas Cowboy.  The size of the house and the lights both equally impressive.  There is talk of Tony Romo and Jessica Smpson. 

Then somehow from football we shift to firearms.  There are enough guns in the community, the neighbor named Bud leans over and confides, "to take Iraq."  I look at my brother who shrugs non-committally, so Bud must defend himself.  I have never known anyone personally who owned a gun except one person who bought it to use on himself and succeeded, so technically I still don't know anyone and no one in my community in Los Angeles has the firepower for us to take on Iraq, so I am interested to hear what Bud has to say.  The lady in her sixties next door, he says and points, has a lumpy recliner.  "That's my thirty-eight," she has explained to company who sit and notice.  She keeps a loaded thirty-eight under the cushion of the leather Barker lounger arm-chair recliner.  Again I am impressed.

I get home to L.A. before the news that Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan has been assassinated.  There is a world beyond my family.  We do not store loaded guns beneath our chairs, but we have neighbors who do.  We do not talk about world politics but we are aware of them.  There is violence beyond the golf course outside the windows and suicde bombers beyond Dallas, somewhere else in the world but we are something else.  We are family.  We have raised lighted candles to banish the darkness.  We have been kind and generous to each other for a few days.  We have lit candles off one another's in celebration of the One who is called Wonderful, Counselor, and Prince of Peace.