Reclaiming Christmas

 

Longtime readers will know that I keep my blog a calm, peaceful, happy place. I want it to be a refuge from upsetting things, a place you can visit any time and not have to worry about being unexpectedly confronted with sad or worrying or angry subjects. There was one exception to that practice, that being the loss of my dad, and even then I shared very little about how and why we lost him. This post is not about those details, which are intensely personal and painful. It's about grief, and holidays--specifically Christmas--and it has a happy ending. But I wanted to let you know, in case you'd rather skip this post. 

My dad had a complicated but very successful surgery at the beginning of November 2020. By Christmas 2020, it was obvious that due to several circumstances out of our control--namely pandemic protocols before and after his surgery--his recovery was not progressing as it should. He spent all of 2021 bedridden. Two days after Christmas 2021, he entered the hospital for the last time, and passed away on New Year's Day 2022. It was a tragedy--an injustice--and it should not have happened the way it did. Christmas 2022 was our first without him. 

So for the last three years, Christmas has been very, very hard. 

Now you all know that I am a Christmas girl to my core. I love Christmas. We had a Christmas wedding. I love the week between Christmas and the New Year. I love New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. It's my favorite time of year. It seems particularly cruel that all of this would happen at Christmas, but life can be that way, and no one reading this has escaped that cruelty in one way or another.

The holidays are hard for a lot of people, especially if they've suffered a loss, and especially if that loss was near a favorite holiday or special occasion. Many people cope by pulling back from those holidays, sometimes skipping celebrations all together. Sometimes that pulling back is temporary, sometimes it's permanent, and they never again celebrate in the way they used to. I have zero interest in telling people how to grieve, or how to navigate holidays. But I'd like to share what we did.

At the beginning of November, along with the approach of the holidays, those painful anniversaries were looming. They are a fact now. They will come with every Christmas from now on. On the way to worship one Sunday morning, I told Mr. Wonderful, somewhat weepy (me, not him), that I thought I wanted to make Christmas bigger this year, in an effort to increase the ratio of good to bad, sort of overwhelm the negative in a big, sparkly avalanche of Christmas. Bigger, not in terms of money spent, but in terms of what we call at our house "Christmassing." Mr. Wonderful was all in, and we were off.

Oh my, were we off. We started Veterans' Day weekend. He had some time off, and we began by just wandering aimlessly from store to store, looking at all the decorations, talking about what we might want to do this year, having lunch. We had a really lovely day. It was a good time to do it because it's early in the season and everything is well-stocked and not very crowded. We've never done that before as I'm usually the one who scouts all the Christmas stuff while he's at work, but we made a new tradition. And we committed to Christmas as hard as we could (that's Christmas as a verb, mind you, as in "Christmassing hard").

A few days later, in a moment of Christmas insanity, I revealed my idea to have an open house for the entire squadron... in a month's time. Mr. Wonderful was on it like a duck on a June bug, whipping up an invitation before I could come to my senses and change my mind. The now-famous Cookie Drop-In was born.

We didn't do anything halfway. All the decorations. All the lights. Lights and wreaths and garlands out front, lights and an inflatable Christmas kitty in the backyard (I said it was for the babies to look at, but Toasty became this year's mascot for us). Two Christmas trees. Twenty-six dozen cookies. Parties. Music. Food. Everything.

It was a wonderful Christmas. 

Did the grief break through at times? Of course. But it will break through forever. It's now a part of our lives. What happened cannot un-happen. So, what to do with it? Well, after three years, I looked at that big lump of awful sitting in the middle of my favorite holiday and decided to slap some lights on it and make cookies.

My dad would love it. My dad does love it.