By Chris Eckl

When Christmas comes to Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cancer Home it stays for the rest of the year.

As in any other home decorations go up and are taken down, Santa Claus assumes a place of honor and then is tucked away in a box, but the spirit of Christmas - giving, receiving and dignity - remains with the patients and nuns at the rambling brick building on Washington Street.

Christmas seems to creep into the home in mid-December. A star appears in a window. A crib is put up in a ward.

“And before you know it the place is ablaze with Christmas, with a type of holiness and happiness which satisfies an eager child or stirs the hardened cynic,” said Father Pat Connell, chaplain at the home for the past five years.

What makes Christmas such a happy time at the home? Father Connell repeated the question and then replied, “One would imagine that in a place where people are sick unto death, Christmas would be toned down - not as joyful for patients, staff and visitors.

“But as in so many things involving attitude, it is a time of a particular kind of joy and satisfaction that seems to sustain the sick and the casual visitor alike,” he said. “The finality of the illness identifies the purpose for which the Prince of Peace came - to restore goodness to His world by embracing willingly an ennobling suffering.” But Christmas day’s routine won’t be much different for the Dominican Sisters of the Servants of Relief. The 16 nuns at the home will rise at 4:45 a.m. and do their initial ward work before attending Mass at 6:30 a.m. A slight exception to the normal day will be midnight Mass.

After the morning Mass Father Connell will take Holy Communion to many of the 60 patients. “I don’t think I would know which patients are Catholic (only one of 19 is,) until the sisters showed me,” he said, “but all patients receive a blessing.”

What will Sister M. Josephine, O.P., who has been at the home since 1939, do? “I’ll do the same as I do everyday,” the superior said. Well, not quite. She will open her Christmas mail and gifts. It will be the first mail she has received in four weeks because nuns are not allowed to open their mail during Advent.

One thing that impressed Sister Josephine about the Christmas season is the generosity of the many people and students who bring gifts to the home and help decorate it. This year, the waitresses at the nearby Howard Johnson’s restaurant saved their money and purchased more than $60 in items for the children and patients at the home.

But as long as she has been at the home, Sister Josephine cannot fully explain the spirit that warms the home on Christmas Day. She said, “The home is so cheerful and if it happens to be raining you may not even notice it.” She did touch on the spirit when she said the nuns were “uninhibited.”

On a tour of the home, any visitor will meet smiling nuns -- Sister Imelda in the nursery, Sister Benedict who breeds fish, Sister Loretta in the pharmacy, Sister George who wants to know what happened at St. Anthony’s Parish Congress and Sisters Kevin and David on one of the women’s wards.

Their ward has the largest piece of mistletoe -- it looks more like a bush -- in Atlanta.

Sister Kevin told one of her patients that if she sat under the mistletoe she would be kissed. The woman replied, “Oh no sister. I don’t want to get married again.”