It’s Christmas Day 2010, the day after the evening that Santa Claus comes, and all through the land, children are waking up with the keen desire to discover what gifts Santa has brought them this time. Christmas is not a day I celebrate as a religious holiday, although I know that many people do. I believe that that the extent to which Christmas is celebrated as a religious holiday depends on the tradition one was brought up in as a child.
Christmas for me is always engenders a bit of mixed emotion. On the one hand, we have a truly excellent day on tap for this Christmas Day of 2010: Gifts being opened with Daughter Number one and then my wife’s traditional Christmas morning breakfast of eggs, bacon, and wild rice from her home state of Minnesota. And then, we hop in the truck and head north to Redding for more gift openings and Christmas dinner with Daughter Number Two, her husband, his children, and our very own grandson. The latter, at just over age two and a half, is just coming in to his own ‘Santa season’, so both of us are looking forward to that. Christmas is, after all for kids—and for their doting parents and grandparents.
This is all happy, happy stuff, the kind of thing that memories are made of, and making memories is exactly what I want to do with this day.
The mixed emotions for me come from the fact that Christmas always brings back memories from my own childhood. I remember being a child myself and my family gathering to open presents and sit down to visit around Christmas dinners of a half century and longer ago. I remember faces and voices of people I loved—my mother, my grandmother, my grandfather, great aunts and uncles—who loved me and who celebrated and delighted with me as I discovered the new treasures Santa had brought for me. Faces and voices from whom I have long been separated by the years and years that have passed since their passing. That’s the sad part; at Christmas, even though they have been gone almost fifty years, I remember and I miss my mom and those other dear family members who left this life so long ago. And, I miss my life with them as it was when I was a child, carefree, nurtured and loved.
But that is the natural cycle of life. Birth, life, the passage of time, and death are natural rhythms and have been since time immemorial. They affect us all in the same way. I find that as I get older, that thought is actually somewhat comforting to me.
Today I celebrate the life I have now; the wonderful wife I love with all heart and my daughters and my sweet adorable grandson. I’m hoping to help lay down some memories of today for them that will some distant future day be as dear to them as the ones I have from my own childhood.
Merry Christmas to all.
1 comments:
What a lovely story! I share those similar memories at Christmas time. I get sad, however am happy to be able to recall the laughter, smiles and love.
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