The Detroit Free Press features a column on Susan Ager’s 5 favorite words from a Christmas song (excerpt):
Today, warmed by a natural gas furnace, I write that line on Christmas cards to friends I haven’t seen in years: tidings of comfort and joy.
Beyond money, beyond food and shelter and love, we need nothing more than comfort and joy, cousins in the Happiness family, but stark opposites in personality.
Comfort is simple and easy-going. It’s about the familiar, the safe and reliable. Comfort is family, no matter how weird some members might be. Comfort is warmth, heavy socks, bright smiles, the fire a boy tends in a homemade backyard fire pit at his parents’ holiday open house. Comfort is routines and traditions which, no matter how silly or sentimental, give us peace because we know how they will unfold.
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But joy? Ah, joy is elusive. We cannot force it or predict it. We cannot find it by looking in the old familiar places. We can invite it to every party, but it shows up at very few.
If comfort is long and deep, joy is brief and sharp, a sudden swelling of the heart for reasons too small to so electrify the moment.