Christmas
I sit here on a crisp January morning, and Christmas is long gone. Gone from the windows and the table. Gone with Frank Sinatra singing “Whatever Happened to Christmas?”
But it’s still there. Still in my mama’s hands as she takes down the last of the decorations. Still in the window where the Christmas tree stood, a beacon looking out at the world by which we remember how to live.
It’s still in my youngest brother’s face, in the Whoville cookies we made that ended up Whoville by happy accident. In the gingerbread men my sister made that tasted just like the Christmas I needed.
In the songs and the stories we sang and lived. Christmas is the chance you get to remember how you want to live the rest of the year. Yeah, we can do without all the cliché Christmas music most of the year, the tacky decorations of commercial Christmas, but what we can’t do without is how it reminds us how to smile at the little things, be quiet in the depths of winter, to fill our souls with goodness, to listen more than to speak, to love more than trying to be loved.
And so Christmas Day has come and gone, but may it live on and be Christmas in our hearts. The traditions we hold to are pleasures and sweetness, but they hold us together. Like the sugar cookies and the chocolate covered peanut clusters. The decorating of the Christmas tree after Thanksgiving. The reading of Christmas stories that make us girls cry and the boys roll their eyes, the advent candles flickering new life on the sill, my grandma decorating cookies with us.
Christmas is this great swelling of past, present and future into one whole magnificent conglomeration, a simultaneous ending and new beginning. Christmas never dies. It only has a slowing decrescendo and a rising crescendo, but it is never gone entirely.
“Let the bells keep on ringing
Making angels in the snow
And may the melody surround us
When the cracks begin to show
Like the petals in our pockets
May we remember who we are
Unconditionally cared for
By those who share our broken hearts
As gentle as feathers
The snow piles high
Our world gets rewritten and retraced every time
Like fresh plates and clean slates
Our future is white
New Years resolutions are reset tonight”
“It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.”
“When the year dies in preparation for birth
Of other seasons, not the same, on the same earth,
Then saving and calamity go together make
The Advent gospel, telling how the heart will break.
Therefore it was in Advent that the Quest began.”
“The Christmas candle burns hot, gives its light, gives its Light—and the world lights up, and Christmas goes on forever now.”
Coming next . . .
How to Start a Fire