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.