The long train of Christmases adds another carriage. For many seasons, melancholy curdled the messy merry-ness of the holidays, my life passing me by, December by December, and I wondered, would I ever get the hang of it?
This year, something unfamiliar: gladness.
My grandsons, Bryce and Tyler, have turned 12. This could be their last innocent Christmas. I remember the loss of magic when the bubble burst for me, so I wanted this season to be special. I resolved to stop watching the holidays from the sidelines and get into the game.
On the playing field, the view is different. The excess is less annoying and the lights shine brighter. A friend wished me “a beautiful Christmas,” which changed my perspective, as did Primal Intelligence, a book by Angus Fletcher, who advocates approaching life not with logic first and foremost, but leading instead with intuition, imagination, emotion, and commonsense. Pay attention, he says, to the “exceptions,” the unusual, the unconventional, the offbeat, the out of the ordinary.
Applied to Christmas, that might mean a Nativity scene of figures “abducted” by ICE, seeing the parallels between our era and the time Jesus was born, when his parents became refugees, fleeing Christmas to avoid the massacre of innocents.
Expect the unexpected, the doorways to Christmas. Every holiday season, something new is born. Something good, something important. Most of all, hopefully, us.
Christmas — the beautiful version — makes us want to be better human beings. More caring, more generous, more sensitive to others’ needs, all the qualities the Herods of our day do not possess. It’s the season for focusing on the good in spite of the ugliness. There is so much ugliness — but so much beauty also.
If my grandsons’ enchanted bubble bursts, now or next year or the year after, I will try to help them find the unexpected beauty in their Christmases.
Meanwhile, my 3-year-old granddaughter, Charlotte, is just climbing onto the bubble for her magic ride. And I’ll climb on right behind her, anticipating enchanted Christmases yet to come.
Why, amidst the human wreckage of our national chaos-and-cruelty crisis, this Christmas season should brim with meaning, more than the Christmases that came before, is a mystery, but it makes this one feel like a miracle in its own right.
All these years I waited for a Christmas miracle that never arrived. Then there it was, like Dickens’ Christmas Carol — a series of visitations, a conversion, an open door inviting entry, defying expectations.
With Christmases past parading in my mind, this Christmas presented itself and joined the parade in all its finery.
A Christmas for refugees, escaping the massacre of innocence, and I, a stranger in a strange land, stranger than all other times, showed up, unbound by obligation. Returning like the prodigal son to Christmas with conviction, hoping for scraps but surprised to be accorded a place at the feast like any other, welcomed with a sense of belonging, re-admitted and forgiven, no questions asked, based on the proposition that all souls are endowed with life, equality, and ensuing gladness.
A succession of pageantry soon surrounded me: a deep early-December snowfall; shoppers milling; gifts thrusting themselves in my direction as if they knew who for, windows on State Street reimagined, as if emerging from more charming beforetimes; Christkindlmarket aglow with mulled wine, wood carvings, glass ornaments and warm cinnamon-sugared pecans; young skaters gliding behind animal figures to stabilize them. The mirrored Bean, reflecting a shining tree that gave its life for holiday spirit, Morton Arboretum awash with luminous color. Having breakfast at George’s, showered with bacon, picking out a Balsam/Frasier hybrid at the Dombrowski tree lot (Christmas-tree evolution!) on a single-digit Saturday morning, giving it glorious ornamentation and a spangled last hurrah, my two 12-year-old decorating consultants lining my bedroom walls with white lights and Scotch tape. How I’ll sleep at night is anyone’s guess. But they may not be sleeping either, if enchantment has anything to say about it.
I read, the other day, a line from a church sermon a few years back: “On Easter Sunday, death began to die.” If that’s true, then on Christmas, life began to be born.
I’m approaching this Christmas like I approach each summer. You only get a limited number in a lifetime, and each is one less left. So it’s well worth showing up. We are the holidays, in all our perfect imperfection, like every generation that passed this way before.
And every December, we have the opportunity to find our place in the parade.
Have a beautiful Christmas and a holiday season filled with gladness.
