Oscar Wilde once said, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

            You may see the worst hapening over here, when all you have to do is turn your head and heaven sits two feet away.

            I mention heaven because we’re moving into the holiday season and other worlds tend to crowd our minds at this time. Not the usual “Heaven”, where you go and get all the ice cream you want, but the important place from which we all fell to earth, where we all once floated around as angels and somehow decided we wanted to touch objects, feel pain, learn and create. That’s earth.

            Sometimes we dragged our best buds into our plans; “Come on, you can be a Red Sox fan down there, I’ll cheer the Yankees!” He replies, “Red Sox! How far south are we gonna fall!” But then after some amicable nudging you both agree to forget Paradise for 80 earth years, set your lesson plans, and take bodies.

            So in a way we are all fallen angels, with a very subtle memory of the cloud we once inhabited. And it seems that around the holidays our hearts become particularly nostalgic, and we call all our old angel friends around us to share the joy that we knew every moment before the fall.

            That’s what our hearts want. Then they show up at the door on Thanksgiving or Christmas!

            There’s the great angel of tolerance Chamuel, now prancing around in Uncle Tim’s bloated body that smells a bit like a car engine, moaning that his ex-wife is hounding him for his back alimony. And the precocious silent one Chatoum, a 12 year old neurotic ADD nephew loaded with caffeine who can’t get his palm-size game to work so throws it at his nervous mother.

            Of course there’s Uncle Vinny, your old heavenly friend Gavreel – angel of peace – drunk and spewing obscenities over the turkey about how the minorities get everything in this country, loud enough for you rowdy Hispanic neighbors to hear through your cracked windows. Your brother sits in complete agreement behind his protruding, caveman like brow, his pants open in the front as he coughs food back onto his plate. Once I knew him as Hamael, one of the greatest dignity, but now he sits there blowing his nose over and over again into a shredded napkin.

            And not all have forgotten their roots. Aunt Peg, the pious one who blessed the table again after she said your blessing was petty, spends the day browbeating the men for watching football and the women for having sex all the time, in and out of marriage. Ironically, we never saw her in Heaven before this life; we tend to think she rose from some other supernatural abode.

            Of course, some never forget. Some, like Nonnie Jennie and Poppie Joe, were blessed with a complete memory of their lives in Paradise, and shared that enormous love with us who may have forgotten.

            Me, I’d like to think I was Jophiel – Inspirer of Enlightenment. One day long ago I looked down on the earth with this rabble beside me, and said we can make a difference in the lives of those tiny men and women who touch the earth. And I think in their own way these angels – turned – family do make a difference. For despite all their faults and horrid, horrid costumes you love them intensely, for no apparent reason at all!

            And they do serve as examples to others who are struggling to remember Heaven. They prove that behind the mask of every human is a glowing Cherubic soul who’s just playing a bit part for a very short time on this planet – all actors who forgot they were in a play. You, as a fallen angel yourself, simply have to pull your eyes from the gutter and look at the stars.