What I've Learned About Christmas

My parent’s Christmas tree was a frail, beautiful thing, cut directly from God’s splendor with a small saw and large heart. Many times only to be found by the diligent on cross-country skis, the perfect tree later in life inevitably turned out to be much closer to the road. It was an act of homage to borrow an elemental from heaven’s backyard and dress it in memorial to the greatest birth the world has ever known.

When I think back on the Christmas of my childhood, it is a mother’s love that permeates the good memories. No holiday music was cheesy to her, no Christmas candy too decadent. To return later in life was a privilege to be coveted. Going home for the holidays was to be handed the consummate hall pass: a week or two away from the cadre of adulthood – permission to be stupid and corny and without care, like the innocent, big-toothed child we all once were.

Back in early adulthood, before our father died, before our mother left their mountain home forever – back before the effrontery of reality mercilessly beat the hope from us – it was Christmas that provided the one true time machine, better than anything H.G. Wells could have dreamt up. Back then a trip home for the holidays somehow transported us to a time and a place when all that mattered was the moment: fresh, odiferous, cinnamon bread in the oven and the unspoken assurance that the future held infinite promise.

I believe with all my heart that mothers are the reflection of the true meaning of the holiday: the celebration of whatever right is left in the world; the celebration of the selfless, pragmatic, caretaker who puts His arms around us and make us feel warm and safe from the cold. Mothers represent the truth in all of us, the inarguable fact that each of us ought to be a better person, if for no other reason than because she was.

My mother was a saint of sorts, as most mothers are, and though she loved it for many years, the wiser she grew the more she disliked Christmas, albeit for all the right reasons.

This list is a memorial to her, a mother of three who passed away on April 13th this year in the 60th year of her life. I think she would have liked this list, because she was more than a mother; she was a confidant and a friend – a woman with a fine sense of humor and a supply of love as never-ending as night in a star-filled Wyoming sky.

Christmas is Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life, not Jingle All the Way or Christmas with the Kranks.

Christmas is about the spirit of giving, not the spectacle of receiving.

A Christmas without a little humor isn’t Christmas at all.

Gaining weight at Christmas is a privilege and honors the cook.

A reading of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas on Christmas Eve should be as commonplace as a recitation of The Lord’s Prayer in a football locker room.

If Jesus returned to earth tomorrow, you would not find Him at the local mall, regardless of the incredible last-minute holiday sale.

Christmas lights are beautiful, but not when they go up the day before Thanksgiving.

There is always someone who is having a worse Christmas than you. Lighten up.

Christmas is the 2nd best reason to come home for the holidays to see your family. The best is because you love them.

Sending correspondence to someone once a year in the form of a Christmas card is not rude. It reminds them that as busy as you might get, as distant as the miles may be, you will never forget.

Food never tastes better than when it’s shared across the table from someone you have missed.

Cutting wood for Dad’s fire is something you will miss long after Christmas has passed and the muscles have lost their soreness.

Christmas in the stillness of the mountains is like no other Christmas in the world. If Jesus returned tomorrow, you just might find Him there.

Our mother will be missed, because though Christmas had become less and less her favorite holiday, it was always about family to her, and there will be a place setting too large to ever fill at our table this, and every year to come. To me she will always be remembered as she passed from this world:

A frail, beautiful thing, cut directly from God’s splendor.