There is nothing quite as exciting for a kid as Christmas Eve night, when the heavenly carpet rolls out and the magic of stars turns into morning. It’s magical for adults too. I used to get so excited on Christmas Eve that I couldn’t fall asleep. High octane anticipation was flowing through my bloodstream like nobody’s business, so much so that my dad would give me a placebo – a baby aspirin – and told me it would make me sleepy. Getting that aspirin on Christmas Eve may have been a strange tactic for a parent, but it worked. I took my tiny pink aspirin believing it would take me to some other universe during the night and awaken me like a locomotive whistling around the tree in the morning.
Still, imbedded underneath that brightly lit tree are memories that aren’t so pleasant.
My grandmother, who suffered from mental illness, almost burnt our house down one Christmas when she tried to fill the fireplace up with wrapping paper. This is not a Christmas we talk about much. It is too personal and too complex to hear this time of year. It’s part of our dirty laundry, and no one wants Christmastime to be tarnished with stains. No one wants that day to be filled with laundry that needs to be aired. We are looking forward to the clean crisp air of good tidings. That’s the air we want, the perfect family picture.
And yet, some of our most important Christmas moments, the ones we reminisce about, are the ones that took years for us to process. They are like the ones about my grandmother. They were difficult then, and they are still difficult to understand. They were frustrating and awkward and didn’t feel like Christmas at all, but they were part of the day. Those memories have pressed us to look in the face of what family is, in the light of stories that make us bristle and edgy, stories we are still trying to figure out. They have forced us to go deeper, do some heavy mental lifting, and see all of Christmas, not just the parts that are well lit under the tree.
Family and Christmas. How are those two ever going to be able to sit in the same room together?
Just ask the woman that is in labor on Christmas day what those pains are like. Like a mother named Mary. Ask the father what it’s like to be on the run and ostracized by a community. Like a father named Joseph. Talk to a blue-collar worker who had to work on Christmas Eve when everyone else got that day off. Ask the owner of a stable. And talk to some travelers who are tired and hungry and uncomfortable, trying to reach their destination by a star in the sky. Like a group of wise men.
None of those conversations would be easy or look like a family photo that went viral. You would hear confusion, and worry, and you would see tears. You would see frightened faces who didn’t know the future, who were stumbling along in the blind, asking a lot of questions no one had answered to. In our family we have had a few uncertain Christmas days like those.
Yes, we all have you say, but is it necessary to talk about them now? At Christmastime?
No, of course not. We don’t have to, but aren’t they what Christmas is really about? We can skillfully play our parts when we hear “Lights! Music! Action!” And that’ll work until there’s a cameo appearance, and then everything you’ve expected out of Christmas goes up in flames.
We’ve had a few of those cameos in our family also.
We had one this Christmas, a day that began to feel like a long series of bad bloopers. These were our outtakes:
The mobile van delivering my elderly father got stuck on a treacherous hill that took us two hours to get free. We spent the day trying to get him back home, which effectively cancelled the meal and the fun games we had planned. My son-in-law, shoveling a path in the snow, stressed over his father’s near-fatal heart attack while shoveling snow. We worried about the muddy wheelchair marks my dad embedded in the carpeting, and while we were busy worrying, the lasagna burnt up in the oven. We had two falls on the ice, kids that had meltdowns, and slowly, the miracle of Christmas began to fizzle out like a flat soft drink, with everyone just really wanting to be back home, in the safety of what was familiar.
They were our cameos, the family pictures that weren’t in the Christmas script. They came on Christmas day just like another cameo appearance long ago when a baby was born, whose birth was inconvenient and troublesome and gut-wrenching and cold and risky. Traveling was dangerous, meals were sparse, tempers were short, and the baby’s future up for debate. His was a birth surrounded by dirt and animals, and strangers and stress. It left those in attendance wishing they could just be somewhere else where it was warm and safe.
But…
It left the rest of the world with a Miracle – The Prince of Peace – and a birthday we’ll never forget. It’s called Christmas.