🔵 By Timothy Brunner. Photo by lauragrafie.
A sad reality that I recognized this past week is that my mother does not celebrate Christmas. Other holidays and celebrations are muted with her and my siblings as well, but Christmas saddens me more than the rest. As a Catholic Christian, Christmas is a celebration of the birthday of Jesus and a day to remember the Holy Family. Each of our own families are a reflection of this model family, so the holiday comes to be a celebration of family itself in a very specific and particular way. (As a parenthetical note on parenting: It strikes me that Jesus celebrated His first birthday with his mother and step-father. Maybe my father’s abandoning me was so inspired.) I do realize the difficulty in celebrating a holiday for family with the burden of grief my mother carries. It is not easy to accept so much without resenting some. That is enough to sadden me. What utterly devastates me, though, is how much my mother made Christmas so wonderful when I was a child. The contrast casts a stark shadow.
Even though we were poor, my two sisters, my mother and myself were happy. That is an evaluation based on the perception of the child that I was, though. My mother surely could not have been happy that we seldom had tomorrow’s dinner in the hose. It must have constantly worried her that she was one emergency away from a crushing medical bill. I do not hold to the idea that were happy in our poverty: We were happy because we were children who did not know we were poor. My mother made that ignorance possible. Those Christmas celebrations as a child allowed my mother to share in our childish joy. A holiday for family where we could be a family. These days it seems that Christmas only serves to remind my family of how we were torn apart. So much so that we no longer came together.
I wish I could give my mother a Christmas present of presence. An awareness that, though things have changed, family is in the heart more than in the flesh. We all live on through each other, so we can only die when we are forgotten.
Yes, my family has changed. It will continue to as time punishes us all. Yet, I remember my family on Christmas and I pray someone returns the gift of my presence as they remember me, too.