Missing Christmas

We all do it - we live our lives, going about our day, and then, we get back home at the end of it all and something strikes us: a moment we totally missed. A word that someone said that we didn't latch onto, a question we should have asked but didn't, an encouragement we should have given but held back. The list goes on and on. We come home with regrets that, honestly, we weren't even aware of in the moment most of the time. Only later does it occur to us what that nagging feeling was, that tug on our hearts, that preoccupation in our minds. Only later do we see what we missed, but by then, it's too late. 

So it is, too, with Christmas. 

Many of us are so busy doing all of the Christmas-related things that we look up sometime in late December, take a deep breath, and realize...we missed it. Again. 

We're shopping and baking and traveling and cooking and wrapping and unwrapping and decorating and singing and dressing up and going to parties and visiting the family and attending church services and donating our time to serve others and driving around to see the lights and having family portraits taken and...and then, it's almost January and we look up and wonder where Christmas went. 

We were so surrounded by all of the accoutrement that we missed the moment, and now, it's gone. Again. 

Whatever happened to a silent night? 

Where was our holy night?

It's one of the things we look most forward to in the Christmas season every year: the stillness. At least, I do. When the darkness settles in a little bit early and the lights come on and there's a twinkle in the air and there's just this quiet that doesn't exist in the rest of the calendar. Maybe it's because unlike the spring and the summer and the fall months, there's no low-grade hum in nature. No chirping of the crickets. No warbles of the birds. No buzzing of the bees. Around Christmas, when all is still, all is really still. 

(Okay, yes, I know it's not, but it feels that way because it's just quieter. Measurably quieter.) 

And yet, so many of us go through the season without any of that quiet in our souls. None of it. We don't get that moment that we've waited all year for, that we prepare for months for. We put up our tree, having that little gnawing in our hearts that knows what it will be like when we finally get to just plug it in and sit down in its glow...but we can't sit down. 

We bake our cookies, thinking about what it will be like to take a long, slow bit of a still-warm sugar fresh out of the oven...but we end up shoving one in our mouth while we're rolling the next batch for the oven. Because there's just no time. 

We wrap our presents, then we pile them under the tree, and what seemed like an empty, inviting space now suddenly feels crowded and is so loaded with anticipation that we mistake it for worry - will they really like it? Do they already have one? We can't wait until Christmas comes and we get to watch someone we love unwrap something that we loved for them. And all of a sudden, that inviting space has filled with this weird sense of pressure....

'Tis the season, isn't it? 

This is the way the world has taught us to do Christmas. So it's no wonder we look up when it's all over, when we finally get our stillness, when all is finally quiet...and realize we missed it again. 

The baby in the manger? Already on His way back to Nazareth with Mary and Joseph.

Shucks.