I don’t decorate. I have enough trouble keeping up with essentials. Right now, in a feeble attempt to decorate for Christmas, half a red garland hangs on our house, in lopsided mockery of décor.
No tree this year. You can’t imagine the time saved by not putting up a tree!
Decoration, I figure, is for people of leisure or taste.
Once, when visiting a home goods store on vacation, I admired the dainty, orderly and splashy looking items and saw what I was missing: a whole array of things to dust. But among the vases, pots, table linens and candles stood something different: a bust of Caesar Augustus.
What, I wondered, was this doing here? But there it was and at a very reasonable price, too. Imagine owning an emperor for thirty bucks! Since my husband Art teaches Roman history, what could be a better accessory than the head of a Roman emperor?
I mailed it home, carefully wrapped, and it made it without breaking. The bust sat regally in our living room -- among the clutter and laundry, books and dirty socks. The kids would dress Augustus in hats, sunglasses or earphones. After about three months, my husband took him to school to use in a class.
He then placed him in a gym bag in his office. Augustus remained in that bag on a chair. Weeks passed. One day, Art needed the chair for a student, forgot what was in the bag and tossed the bag to the floor. The early fall of the Roman Empire ensued.
The way Art described the shattering of Augustus, I assumed the bust was a permanent “bust,” but months later, the gym bag and ruins of Augustus came home, and I saw that he was in four large pieces, a little more than a triumvirate!
In no time, with ordinary Elmer’s, I had restored the Roman Empire, and Augustus now sits on a dining room counter next to our crèche, with only a prominent jaw line to show for his travails.
Augustus is the one Roman emperor mentioned in the Christmas story, with his plan to tax all the world, so I figure it’s appropriate for him to loom over the stable.
We don’t know much about this tax plan except it was typical of bureaucracy, forcing people like Joseph to go out of their way, at much inconvenience, for nothing.
From what the resident historian tells me, Augustus tried to unify Rome by encouraging emperor worship. So the people worshiped their emperor.
Meanwhile, another god/king slipped into the empire quietly one Christmas night. This one, though, was King of Kings and Lord of Lords; though weak and small, he came as God of all, into a little town in the far corner of the empire.
Years later, when the Christ-child grew up, he was trapped when asked whether it was right to pay taxes to oppressive Rome. If he said to pay, he was taking the side of oppressors. If he said not to pay, he could be in danger of treason charges.
He asked his critics to show him a coin.
“Whose image is this?” he asked.
“Caesar’s,” they told him.
“Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God.”
The saying has lasted more than two thousand years, and stands as a good rule, even for Christmas today.
When our tax forms arrive –- as they will pretty soon – that saying could serve as a prompt not only to remember what we owe Uncle Sam, but what we owe God, too.
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