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We were standing beside our cars, Chris by his door and I by mine, saying our goodbyes. Traffic was rushing by on Fraser Highway, making it difficult to hear. But as Chris raised his hand in a wave and beamed a last, broad smile, I distinctly heard him call out, Yabba-ka-doodles!

Yabba-what? What did he mean? What language was this? As we'd just been talking of Jewish matters, I wondered if Chris might be delivering some traditional Yiddish holiday greeting. I felt a bit like Mary, who, when hailed by the angel Gabriel, "wondered what kind of greeting this might be."

"What did you say?" I called back.

This time Chris threw back his head, beamed as brightly as if he were seeing an angel himself, and belted out, YABBA-KA-DOODLES!

Chris is not much given to spontaneous ecstatic utterances. Maybe he was just goofing off? More puzzled than ever, I left my car and walked around to where he was standing.

"I don't get it," I said. "Yabba-ka-doodles. What does it mean?"

"Yabba-what?" said Chris.

"Yabba-ka-doodles. You said Yabba-ka-doodles and I want to know what it means."

"Yabba-ka-doodles? I didn't say Yabba-ka-doodles."

"Then what did you say?"

"I said, 'I'm glad we could do this.'"

"I'm glad we could do this?" I echoed blankly.

For a moment we stared at one another, listening to the sound of this inane, colorless sentence against the rapturous syllables of Yabba-ka-doodles.

And then we both burst into laughter, wild, hilarious, thigh-slapping gales of it there in Ricky's parking lot. It was so absurd a mistake, so gloriously unlikely. And partly because of that, it filled us with that unlikeliest of qualities in this darkly unsettling world—joy! It was a rich and preposterous joy, as surprising as if Santa Claus himself (or his Yiddish uncle) had come thundering down out of the sky in his sleigh.

All the way home in the car I kept muttering, caressing, shouting that silly word—"Yabba-ka-doodles. … Yabba-ka-doodles"—giggling and guffawing like a schoolboy. Talk about joy! More than happy, I felt drunk with joy for the rest of that day. And when Chris and I saw each other next, on Christmas Eve, we nearly jumped into each other's arms, yelling, "Yabba-ka-doodles, brother!"

Who would have believed that so much joy could be contained in one crazy, purely imagined word? Later I wondered: Were my ears playing tricks, or is it possible that Chris, without realizing it, really did say Yabba-ka-doodles? Was he unknowingly used as a messenger of God to me, delivering the joyous news of Christmas in an angelic tongue?

When I was a student at Regent College, one of my Old Testament professors was Bruce Waltke, who had worked on the translation committee for the New International Version. In his lectures, Dr. Waltke loved to linger over the subtleties of ancient Hebrew, expounding different interpretations of a single word or phrase, and building a strong case for his own favored translation. Yet he also pointed out that translation is not salvation. As he was fond of saying, "I've known people who were saved through a verse of Scripture that I know is mistranslated."

On Christmas Adam last year, I was transported into joy through a phrase I had misunderstood, which has now entered my vocabulary as a traditional Christmas greeting. And so, as Tiny Tim piped up, "God bless us, every one," I say resoundingly to each and every one of you: Yabba-ka-doodles!

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December 3 2001, Vol. 45, No. 15