I love this photo - even though its grainy and low quality - it is one of my dearest possessions. Here we are at our wedding a mere five years ago, dancing with our parents to the song “Unforgettable”.
That both of them are gone this Christmas is unfathomable still.
And everywhere I go, everything I watch, everyone I talk to during the holiday season is a reminder that our families aren’t the same.
My family home was reduced to ash. No 18’ tall Christmas tree cut down from our property will grace the living room. My mom’s fine white wedding china won’t be set on the dining table. My mother-in-law’s traditional wild rice soup won’t be made by her careful hands. And at both family tables there will be one less place setting than there should be.
I have cried more leading up to this Christmas season than I care to admit. I somehow thought that all of the “seconds” would be a little less painful than the “firsts” - sorry to play the depressive realism elf but FALSE. It still sucks.
In the car yesterday my husband said, “I am so emotionally conflicted about Christmas this year. Its a season thats all about being joyful, but Im not sure how to have joy when both of our families are broken.”
Doesn’t that just sum it up.
How do you celebrate the season of giving when it seems like so much has been taken away?
How do you let go of the expectation that things will go on as they did before when they never can?
“People touch our lives if only for a moment, and yet we’re not the same from that moment on. The time is not important, the moment is forever.”
The time is not important, the moment is forever.
I love this quote because it says what I can’t seem to put into words. That all those moments - the Christmas mornings and laughter filled dinners, the silly gifts and the prayers around the table, the cookie baking and tree cutting - they changed who I am fundamentally. My dad, my mother-in-law - when they loved on me they were investing in eternity. They were investing in my soul.
And maybe this is how we hold joy in the midst of a radically changed Christmas:
We remember that because of a child born over 2,000 years ago, I will someday dance with my daddy again and my husband will hold his mom. We will sit at the final feast, one that will never have to end, and we laugh harder than we ever did around my childhood table.
And as I think back on those moments of joy, I anticipate the coming of an even better future.
You see, our memories serve as signposts of hope.
“But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”
Like a child on Christmas morning - anticipating the gifts about to be received, things they cannot yet see and do not know - so too do we wait in eager anticipation for the promise of a reunion in heaven, of all things made right and all tears wiped away.
All I wanted for Christmas was one more hug from my dad, one more ‘I love you’; and though I may not get that gift this year, I eagerly await the promise of it in the future. The real gift of Christmas, the real joy, is that we are promised heaven.
“Unto us a child is born, to us a son is given… and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”