Joy Fire

(Cover Photo by Kelley Bozarth on Unsplash)

Let's talk about holiday grief.

I'm not referring to the bozo who cut you off in the parking lot at the overcrowded mall and drew a "good grief" from your best friend in the passenger seat. I'm not talking about Maria Carey's "miss you most" grief, because grief is ridiculously hard to quantify. No, I'm talking about old grief: the grief of losses past. This kind of grief lies dormant in your marrow while the leaves on trees change from green to yellow and orange and burning-bush-red. It's the grief forgotten amid the delight of crisp afternoon hikes with dearest friends, muffled by cozy wool sweaters, and unwittingly silenced with sips of hot apple cider fresh from the orchard. This grief begins to make its presence known as the first days of November give way to the weeks before Thanksgiving. Like arthritic joints prophesying weather changes, its subtle ache deep inside the soul announces the arrival of "the holidays." 

"The holidays": The season when jolly Christmas carols ring out from every radio station and bells ring outside the grocery store and parties abound. During "the holidays", families decorate their homes with happy things and make cookies together and everyone looks forward to grand Christmas celebrations.

That's right. I said "everyone". Isn't it true? Doesn't the child inside each of us pine for Christmas all year long? How could it not be the most wonderful time of the year when food and family and happiness abound? 

How? I'll tell you how. It starts a few weeks before Thanksgiving when someone asks you, "What are you doing for Thanksgiving?" and all of a sudden you realize it's two weeks away and you haven't thought about it. With family a seven hour drive away and a hectic work schedule that picks up the morning after Thanksgiving, travel isn't an option. You always manage to invite yourself to spend the holiday with a friend's family, so you decide not to worry. The right opportunity will come along. In the end, you wake up Thanksgiving morning so glad you don't have to be anywhere that day that you decline the dinner invitation you have and spend the day reading Little Women, eating a chicken fried rice skillet meal, and practicing thankfulness for a day of rest and contemplation. At the end of the day, you congratulate yourself for gliding through Thanksgiving relatively unscathed by grief.

Throughout the weekend, though, the sight of giant evergreens strapped to the roofs of cars driving by takes you back to cold December mornings in Minnesota, tramping through snow halfway up your calves to find the perfect Christmas tree. When the light turns green and the reverie breaks, you wonder if you'll bother getting a Christmas tree this year. You've upheld the tradition the last several years, but this year you don't really feel like decorating the house. It doesn't feel like the hearth of home and family that you long for, and a few boughs of evergreen and some family ornaments won't change that - not to mention you're working so much that you'll hardly be home to enjoy the decorations. 

Ah, yes, work: that lovely means of distraction from unpleasant emotions, difficult seasons, unmet expectations. It's particularly ironic when you escape the arthritic grief of "the holidays" by working for the railroad museum's Christmas train. How exactly does one avoid Christmas by going to the North Pole seven times a weekend, greeting Santa over and over, and singing Christmas carols? Well, it works when those things have nothing to do with what always made Christmas, well, Christmas.

Christmas begins with the family day spent picking out a Christmas tree, helping Dad carry it up the snowy steps of the back deck and through the sliding glass door, and picking up the oodles of needles scattered across the family room carpet to the silky tunes of Anne Murray's Christmas album as it rotates on the record player. On the Eve of Christmas, it's time for wrapping up in a hand-me-down rabbit fur coat and cuddling close to your sister under the fleece blanket in the back of the station wagon as Dad drives to Grandpa and Grandma's church. As you stand and sing, Grandpa's husky voice mingles with yours, his hand on one side of the hymnal and yours on the other. Dinner comes next with Grandma's Norwegian meatballs and Aunt Robyn's mashed potatoes, and at long last, the opening of presents, but not before listening once again as Dad reads the Christmas story from the book of Luke. That story part - that is the best part of all.

This Christmas is lit by the warmth of a log cabin fire in the fireplace, serenaded by the laughter of cousins and aunts and uncles, and lingers forever in your memories. The memories are sweet all year long, until the throbbing in your joints reminds you that Christmas is over. It can never be recreated, because someone is missing, many essential people are missing, and no one can take their places.

So what do you do with the holes left in Christmas?

How do you celebrate when it's now more holes than fabric? How can you make Christmas present meaningful when the place you belong vanished into the hole of Christmas past? And what on earth do you do with the volatile substance of Christmas future?

What do you do?

I have a hunch it's more than just you and me who feel this ache. We feel it - collectively, yet alone. It changes shape every year, touches different places. I tell myself it won't be there next year or that it will be barely noticeable. Why? Because part of me still wants to believe someday Christmas will feel like Christmas again. This seems like a rather futile hope, though. Someday I may have a family of my own gathered around the log cabin fire, listening to the Christmas story with bellies full of Norwegian meatballs and mashed potatoes. This could happen, but even if it does it won't be the same. I'm sure it will be wonderful, but it will be a different kind of wonderful.

The question is this: Will I be able to receive that kind of wonderful if I haven't let go of the delight I once knew?

I'm not sure I can let go. My fingers have remained bent around it for so long, I don't know if I can pry them away. I might try, though, if I knew I wasn't the only one trying. There is bravery in unity. Courage can be found in one, but it spreads more easily through two or three or more.

Will you join me?

Can we face this challenge together - those of us who long to fully abandon ourselves to a new hope and a new joy yet hold back, because we're not sure it will hold us? Perhaps the moment we begin to peel and pry with all the unison of a choir of three-year-olds will be the first place we are met with the glimmer of new hope. Then, maybe then, we'll gain the courage to unfold stiff joints, grasping the stony ache in one hand and the flinty hope in the other.

As we hold the stone and the flint and breathe in the Oxygen - before we ever see a spark - may we say, "This is enough."

In the glorious moment when (yes, I said when) from strike the first spark flies, may we give great thanks for that one spark that conquers the darkness, even if just for a moment. For every spark that flies thereafter, may our gratefulness grow higher and fuller, and when we are finally consumed by joy, may we never stop telling the story of that first moment: 

In that moment it was just the stone and the flint and the Breath and it was good.  

- J