Twenty-two years of Christmas: they’ve mostly been the same. Christmas Eve service followed by our tradition of one-gift eve and setting cookies out for Santa. When we were younger, my blood and bone siblings would make a pallet and read a Christmas story together before going to bed only anticipating an early morning rise to find our gifts under the tree. As I grew older I realized I found more joy in giving a gift than opening my own. I realized Christmas was more than baking a cake with too few candles wishing Jesus a happy day. I remember when I was young being in love with the Christmas season because I got to wear a sweater that matched my mom’s. I wore it with a velvet skirt and black pantyhose. My hair swung above my shoulders and was pulled back by a headband.
This is my first Christmas to be spent away from my family, away from my native language, my culture, my church. This is my first Christmas to not wake up with my siblings to sleepily stumble downstairs in our pajamas for coffee and a glance out the window with fingers crossed for the romanticized White Christmas. My first Christmas without my parents. My first Christmas without my family to cook and eat and clean with, to look into my grandpa’s eyes and see the life, still. Or to see the empty chair where my grammy sat for all those years. To remember of her work and love for Jesus that she made her entire life about, who is now kissing jesus and washing his feet with her long, blond hair.
I’ve entered this Advent season with an Advent devotional that has focused and reminded me of what Christmas is about. Why it changed all of my story; why it changed all of the world. Though in the past, Christmas has been about gathering with family and recalling and stalling in the gratitude of each other, this year all of these things have been taken from me. I’m in Paris, in a youth hostel, where I can look out and see the Louvre. I have no fine meal prepared, no company to share it with, no hands to hold in our prayer. Being here and stripped of these good, but ungodly things I associate with The Light Coming Down, I’m realizing really that Jesus, Emmanuel, God is with me, is my celebration: my reason to pray and eat and drink and give. Because Jesus was fully God and fully man and was pierced by nails to take away all of the smelly, selfish sin, I have reason to say “merry Christmas!” Jesus was and is and will always be our thrill of hope—our reason to admit to our incapability and inefficiency and only claim his faithfulness and sacrifice and provision for our days eternally.
nonfiction narrator 