Turns out Christmas will come anyway, despite whatever balls (and keepsake ornaments) we may have dropped in these days leading up to it. It won't be perfect. But it will happen. And as it so often does in movies and song, the magic we attribute to this time will heighten feelings and experience.
As I write this, my extended family is celebrating a new baby, born yesterday. A distant friend is posting updates on Facebook from labor and delivery, having survived the last harrowing weeks of an over-40 pregnancy--too much like my own last incubation.
A friend is mourning her son, not two months dead. My husband awoke at 5 a.m. this morning, thinking of his father who died on Christmas Eve, decades ago. And I am missing my dad, more this year than before.
My husband is home. Our tree is up. The last late-night online shopping delivery has arrived. My children have graduated from passive holiday audience to fellow makers of the occasion, contributing their outdoor lighting skills, and their thoughtful gift-giving, hatchet-burying and culinary talents.
In true procrastinator fashion, I will join my husband shortly in planning tomorrow's menu and making up one last shopping list, before heading out to the grocery store to join the throngs.
But in this moment, I want to breathe and to, in my yoga teacher's class-closing words, "fill [myself] up with gratitude for all that [I] have, and all that is yet to come."
Whatever our traditions, and in the most universal sense,
Merry Christmas!
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