A shorter final piece to wrap up 2024 because tis the season to not have time for reading, writing or much of anything else. Enjoy.
And thank you for being here and reading and hearting and commenting and writing back. It continues to mean so much to me.❤️
Every year, when my older kids were younger, their small Episcopal K-8 would host a Christmas chapel on the last morning of school before the long winter break.
Before experiencing this live, I had seen such scenes in cozy Christmas movies and had assumed they’d been orchestrated with expert scripting and good art-direction. I didn’t know that real life could play out organically and so similarly.
I didn’t know it could be so merry.
On this morning, all of us parents would arrive, cramming into pews to watch as the kids paraded down the center aisle.
There were shy kids, looking down and walking fast to get it over with. There were less shy kids — hams my dad would call them — soaking in the attention, waving to this most adoring public.
Every kid would be decked like a finest hall. Most other days of the year at this school, students were plaided and khakied up in uniforms. But on this glorious day, they could choose their own fancy outfit. And so students arrived looking like miniature guests at a holiday party whose invitation had noted festive attire. There were sequins and flounce, slacks and button downs. Some little boys wore ties, even jackets. Some little girls wore bows that blocked their heads like a solar eclipse. Middle school girls wobbled on beginner heels. Middle school boys hobbled with fresh blisters from unfamiliar shoes.
Down the center aisle they would jingle, filing into rows to wait for the whole point: their grade’s turn to sing a song.
The kids would’ve been rehearsing their numbers for weeks during both music class and other academic hours. I think at the time I might’ve wondered about cutting into valuable learning time to just…sing. But I’ve fully changed my tune on this because academic hours run aplenty in a school career; whereas the opportunity to understand the practice and work it takes to do something special for someone you love: never enough.
We, the people they loved, heard all the standards — Silent Night, Feliz Navidad, Rocking Around the Christmas Tree. And even more non-standards — so many niche songs I’d never heard before and assume will never hear again.
There were first graders singing All I Want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth, the union of their small lisping voices a carol of adorable bells.
There were older students who’d decided singing was not for them this year, mouths stone still, enduring the song.
There were, across all grades, ukeleles.
We parents would crane our necks to see the one little head we loved best up there on the risers. Many of us would stack in the side aisles to take pictures or videos, until the year the school announced that it would record the entire proceeding and send a link later so parents could just be in the moment and enjoy the performances live, while they were happening, and not through the tiny rectangle of our phones.
This chapel was the last thing the kids had to do before vacation. The freedom, the promise of the coming weeks made sitting still in pews an impossibility. From the back of the chapel the view was two hundred small and medium heads bobbing as if happy buoys in a holiday sea.
It was so merry.
When chapel ended: bedlam. There would be a reception in the room that served as this tiny school’s cafeteria or gym or theater, depending on the hour of the day. Center tables would be piled with baked goods room parents had solicited with sign up spreadsheets. In the early years, I made cookies. Once a painstaking variety that were meant to look like mugs of hot chocolate somehow, a marshmallow on top of a sugar cookie saucer, with candy cane bends as mug handles. The recipe had seemed so simple. The assembly had not been and the final product looked, above all else, complicated. After that year, I raced to every sign up sheet to secure the win: napkins, plates, cups, sometimes juice — the kinds of non-perishable things that could be purchased and dropped off as-is and in advance.
Every year at this event, I spent at least five frantic minutes searching for a kid, usually my older son, panicking, assuming that though profoundly unlikely given the size and enclosure of the school, it would be my one student who would get kidnapped from Christmas Chapel.
Every year, after asking at least ten people if they’d seen him, I would find my son running on the back playground, a blur, his once stiff button down shirt — which he never looked quite right being stuck in — now untucked and helplessly along for the ride, billowing behind him.
After the feeding frenzy, a playdate frenzy. Invites flying. Friendship roulette. Who would land where? I never knew. I only knew I would leave campus with as few as zero kids and as many as six.
How merry. Year after year, an overflowing of joy. Until, for me, it became a distinctly intolerable scene.
It was 2013. Or 2014. Time had grown hard to mark and measure, and remains hard to remember or categorize.
And yes, of course: a rising chorus of little voices did still warm my heart some, but this couldn’t make a dent in my overall temperature. I was impossibly cold all the time. I wore hats everywhere. People startled at the iciness of my hands because my body had no time for my fingertips. My heart pumped blood exclusively to my brain in order to keep my Catastrophe Factory running smoothly.
The raw materials for this factory were shipped to me hourly by Epilepsy, Inc. And these were incredibly turnkey as parts go. Assembly hardly required. Catastrophes ready made, packaged, all set for relentless distribution.
Among the large worries, the smaller reveals: the realization that my youngest would not come to this little school, would not put on a little bow tie, would not sing a little song, would not blaze around the back playground in a rumpled little shirt. And that this would be one of thousands of ways his life would differ from that of his siblings. From that of most kids.
So when, in whatever terrible year that was, at the conclusion of the chapel, the priest said Go forth and have safe and restful holiday breaks, I caved, collapsed, lost it, knowing I’d become powerless to follow any of those three directives at any time, much less Christmas.
A few close friends, used to helping keep me upright by that point, whisked me out a side door and into an ante room before anyone processed by me. Before anyone dared wish me a Merry Christmas.
Joy can be a terrible thing to see coming when you are estranged from it.
Because when you can’t count on days, you can’t count on Christmas. Despite all its tinsel and trappings, Christmas is just another day. And when you’re going through it, Christmas is just another day to get through. Just another day to hope you’re at home the whole day and not racing to a hospital.
Just another day to watch a season that feels flat and inaccessible sparkle on by.
At all times of year, but especially this time of year, I think a lot about miracles — what constitutes one, who seems to get them, who doesn’t. Why good and deserving people don’t get the miracles they need. How tragically uneven miracle distribution can be.
I spend this time because I am a living witness.
I am not even very religious, but I am a wedding guest at Cana who cannot shut up about the water becoming wine.
I am a beachcomber by the Red Sea who cannot forget the sea just…parting.
I am a mother who cannot believe her son wakes up everyday, walks down the stairs all on his own, eats breakfast and gets ready for a plain old day at school.
I am a witness to a story that feels as miraculous and unlikely as the Christmas story itself. Mary pregnant out of nowhere. My son healthy, out and everywhere. It’s a story I couldn’t have believed that day at Christmas Chapel more than a decade ago.
It’s a reconciliation with joy wholly brokered by a kid saved by a big miracle who sees small miracles everywhere.
Who talks to our Elf on a Shelf and our Christmas tree, the moon, our house, the garden.
Who talks to his toys, and at this time of year, readies them for hoped-for new arrivals the way an expectant mother might prepare a sibling for a new baby.
Who knows that friendliness changes people; that jokes, laughter are a kind of magic.
Who is not surprised by Santa or any of his improbable details. I mean okay, yes, sure, he has questioned some things this year, asking his sister a series of Yeah Buts: yeah but how does Santa do all of that in one night; yeah but how does chubby Santa get down a skinny chimney; yeah but who did all of this when Santa was a baby?
This last question is so insightful — I have to celebrate it for a bit. And then I worry for a few days, telling my daughter that I will be forced to litigate if anyone robs him, robs me, robs us of his beautiful belief. But then I see he is back engaging in his usual merriment — conversing with yard inflatables, etc. — and I’m relieved.
Because while I hope my son lives a big, full life as stuffed as Santa’s sleigh, I also hope he never stops believing in Santa. Years ago, during my Catastrophe Factory’s boom, I would’ve thought these were contradictory wishes. I now understand them to be not just complementary, but causal: my son’s life will be big and full because he believes in so many magical things — Santa just one of them.
Speaking of magical sky arrivals, my older daughter flew in from Boston on Friday night, landing 2.5 hours late and after midnight. She had switched her flight earlier to avoid the snow storm coming on Saturday, but snow always knows when you do this. So the snow arrived early.
The delay was annoying. But de-icing machines are miracles. As are smart and careful pilots. And air travel in general. Planes hardly different than sleighs, guided by blinking red lights, packed with people beloved by other people, floating above us all day and night.
How unlikely to move bodies thousands of miles in every direction in just hours.
What a godsend that this can be done.
When we leave for the airport run, my younger daughter drives because I have already fallen asleep on the couch twice while waiting. Also my daughter questions my eyeballs and their abilities after dark.
We stop at In n Out, the Bay Area’s culinary welcome mat, and get my older daughter’s regular order to greet her with.
The airport is mid-day congested despite the late hour. The line of brake lights ahead of us mixes with the airport’s holiday lights, and idling that might otherwise be irritating feels fitting, merry, packed with anticipation.
“Think of how nice it is that this many people have people who’ll pick them up at midnight,” my daughter says as we inch forward. A Little Thing I’ll keep.
Because she is right.
This isn’t traffic.
This is love.
Which is another miracle.
Jen.
Top 5 most read of jen’s newsletter in 2024 because I’m cool like Spotify:
This one about life, death and magical thinking
This one about parents weekends and never empty nests
This one about a college career flown by
This one about writing and being alone and NYC
This one about family tourism in Switzerland
Read them again or for the first time with all that time you do or don’t have ❤️
Yes Jen your writing is a gift from the heart as always. Best of holidays to all of you and so glad you can all be together - the miracle of family and loved ones!
What a great post ! I love the part about airplanes being like sleighs that fly -- I so agree . Thanks for this holiday spirit .