Christmas Tears
***I am re-running this. It is one of my favorites.***
Excerpt from “Someone Else’s Diary, Vol. II”
By Ree
We had a saying, my sister and I. “Christmas isn’t Christmas until somebody cries.” It seems our Christmas’s were fraught with family fights and stress, but every year I would make the pilgrimage back to the Upper Peninsula and crowd with my siblings into my parents’ tiny little house on the hill with the high hopes of at last having that “perfect Christmas”…with Christmas caroling, sledding and skating, big fluffy snowflakes drifting down to settle on the mounds of snow that glisten and sparkle. Christmas lights shining through the heavily laden branches of the pine tree out in front of the house, mountains of brightly wrapped artistry under the tree...each year was the same futile search for the perfect Christmas.
Our family dysfunction reached beyond Christmas; however, the end of the year seemed to be the pinnacle of outbursts. The magic of Christmas for us was to forget from year to year how difficult the season really was.
I have found myself disentangling from the traditional frenzy of the season of baking cookies at my sister’s while watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” and wrapping gifts for the family member whose name I had drawn at Thanksgiving. Christmas wasn’t about the traditional family celebration that led to someone breaking down in tears due to family feuds and long patterned behaviors. Christmas, I had begun to realize, was more than racked up credit card bills for gifts that would be forgotten about the following year. My quest for the perfect Christmas will never be fulfilled…because the perfect Christmas has already come and gone.
The Christmas of which I speak was not replete with reindeer, jingle bells, or Andy Williams singing “Chestnuts.” The Christmas I am referencing is one of a small stable in the middle of Nowhereville and a young, pregnant teenage girl scared, cold, poor, and alone, but for her husband who probably never had the experience of midwifery. The girl probably was a wreck when her water broke, in pain, bleeding, pushing, straining…lying on a stable floor with very little in the way of comfort. Even the hay would have been tainted with animal feces, urine, grain, dirt…and a baby crowning, slathered in mucus, pushed into excrements that the girl had no control over, and finally she is freed from the pain of birth. The boy child, cried at the cold, blue skin turning pink, covered in blood…but Christmas isn’t Christmas until Somebody cries….
Ordinary, almost 3rd world birth, is it not? Yes, but still, the perfect gift. Through the dirt, mucus, blood, feces…every filthy, unclean thing imaginable to subject a newborn baby to…arrives our hope for rescue from the dirt we have created in our hearts…He has arrived in the form of a squalling, cold, suckling infant. Our salvation has come. This is where my heart shall be at Christmas…with that Baby…Emmanuel…God with us.
Are you crying? I am.
Excerpt from “Someone Else’s Diary, Vol. II”
By Ree
We had a saying, my sister and I. “Christmas isn’t Christmas until somebody cries.” It seems our Christmas’s were fraught with family fights and stress, but every year I would make the pilgrimage back to the Upper Peninsula and crowd with my siblings into my parents’ tiny little house on the hill with the high hopes of at last having that “perfect Christmas”…with Christmas caroling, sledding and skating, big fluffy snowflakes drifting down to settle on the mounds of snow that glisten and sparkle. Christmas lights shining through the heavily laden branches of the pine tree out in front of the house, mountains of brightly wrapped artistry under the tree...each year was the same futile search for the perfect Christmas.
Our family dysfunction reached beyond Christmas; however, the end of the year seemed to be the pinnacle of outbursts. The magic of Christmas for us was to forget from year to year how difficult the season really was.
I have found myself disentangling from the traditional frenzy of the season of baking cookies at my sister’s while watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” and wrapping gifts for the family member whose name I had drawn at Thanksgiving. Christmas wasn’t about the traditional family celebration that led to someone breaking down in tears due to family feuds and long patterned behaviors. Christmas, I had begun to realize, was more than racked up credit card bills for gifts that would be forgotten about the following year. My quest for the perfect Christmas will never be fulfilled…because the perfect Christmas has already come and gone.
The Christmas of which I speak was not replete with reindeer, jingle bells, or Andy Williams singing “Chestnuts.” The Christmas I am referencing is one of a small stable in the middle of Nowhereville and a young, pregnant teenage girl scared, cold, poor, and alone, but for her husband who probably never had the experience of midwifery. The girl probably was a wreck when her water broke, in pain, bleeding, pushing, straining…lying on a stable floor with very little in the way of comfort. Even the hay would have been tainted with animal feces, urine, grain, dirt…and a baby crowning, slathered in mucus, pushed into excrements that the girl had no control over, and finally she is freed from the pain of birth. The boy child, cried at the cold, blue skin turning pink, covered in blood…but Christmas isn’t Christmas until Somebody cries….
Ordinary, almost 3rd world birth, is it not? Yes, but still, the perfect gift. Through the dirt, mucus, blood, feces…every filthy, unclean thing imaginable to subject a newborn baby to…arrives our hope for rescue from the dirt we have created in our hearts…He has arrived in the form of a squalling, cold, suckling infant. Our salvation has come. This is where my heart shall be at Christmas…with that Baby…Emmanuel…God with us.
Are you crying? I am.
posted by Ree @ 11:20 AM
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