Home for Christmas

I absolutely love Aaron Neville's adaptation of Please Come Home for Christmas. The words and the music sum up my feelings right now. They are completely full of soul, full of New Orleans, full of sorrow, and full of hope. That is what I feel right now with my relationships and in my hopes for the future.

However, a more pressing thought though comes to mind. Listen to the song (provided in the clip). Now picture that is the city and of the community that it once was before Hurricane Katrina. Picture it singing those words to those who have left the city for a laundry list of reasons. It might seem like a cliché, but this is at the heart of why New Orleans should be rebuilt.

Why should we — those who have grown up, who have been raised in its eclectic way of life — not return? Would it not be turning a cold shoulder on a dear friend? What of the nation to the region? The city is still in shambles, and to prove this you need only to do a web search for recent images of the city. There are hundreds upon hundreds of homes still rotting away. Progress has not been made, and all levels of government have completely dropped the ball. The city and the region is quickly being forgotten. How can the nation forget so quickly? The people of the region are not asking for a handout, rather they are pleading for a hand up.

Read the words below; think of "the City that Care Forgot." Pray that those who grew up in New Orleans, the place of their birth, and who love it with such a passion and a conviction that defies reason at times, will return. My Aggie peers should understand this driving conviction, I hope. It is something so, so dear.

Pray that the nation as a whole will not let this situation pass into a darkness of not understanding, this struggle of those along the Coast. For when trouble strikes those untroubled and deaf to the pleas, only then will they think it matters most.

Don't dismiss something you don't know. Use it as a challenge to learn of a love that was once, perhaps to you, unknown.

Please Come Home for Christmas

Bells will be ringing the glad, glad news
Oh what a Christmas to have the blues
My baby's gone, I have no friends
To wish me greetings once again

Choirs will be singing Silent Night
Christmas carols, by candle light
Please come home for Christmas
Please come home for Christmas
If not for Christmas, by New Years night

Friends and relations, send salutations
Sure as the stars shine above
But this is Christmas
Yeah, it's Christmas, my dear
It's the time of the year to be with the one you love

Oh won't you tell me
You'll never more roam
Christmas and New Year will find you home
There'll be no more sorrows
No grief and pain
Because I'll be happy, happy once again

Ooo, no more sorrows
No grief and pain
Because I'll be happy, Christmas, once again.