Something happens to me in December: I turn into a big kid. Oh, most of the time I walk around looking like a completely normal, rational, fifty-something adult, but inside the inner kid in me is activated. In fact, I become more of a kid these days than I did when I was an actual child–in my early days I was a somewhat serious kid, what one would today refer to as an “old soul.” But in December all of my enthusiasm for the Christmas holidays comes roaring back. Today, in Western Christian liturgical terms, was the first Sunday of Advent, signaling the period of waiting for the arrival of the birth of Jesus. This morning I sat watching the first few moments of the weekly televised Catholic Mass and couldn’t help but sing along with the children’s choir as they opened with “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” one of my favorite seasonal hymns. It transports me back to childhood days–opening up the different little doors on the Advent calendar each day in December, each week lighting the candles on the Advent wreath, and counting down to Christmas day.
For many years, my nuclear family–my parents and my five siblings–celebrated Christmas with a variety of traditions that for many years included Christmas Eve midnight Mass at Moreau Seminary on the campus of the University of Notre Dame. When I was a kid we would have to take a nap during the late afternoon so we could stay awake through the Mass. We would always leave early to get there, in part because the chapel was small and people crowded in early to hear the choir of seminarians sing Christmas hymns. Often those evenings were snowy and cold. The night was hushed and beautiful, and even as a child I truly felt the words, “O Holy night.” Eventually we stopped going to midnight Mass at the Seminary–it had gotten too big and too much of an extravaganza from what had been a quieter, more intimate celebration. We attended Masses in a variety of venues over the subsequent years, but they were never quite the same.
Over the years Christmas was quite an extravaganza in our family. As we grew up and my older sisters went off to college, the flavor of the holiday shifted. Anticipation for the return of my siblings for the holidays added for me a level of excitement in what was already a terribly exciting time. And even after folks married, some moving away from “home,” we still always gathered as a family, except on those rare occasions when one or another was away–like the year my parents and my younger sister and I were living in Uganda and for the first time celebrated Christmas away from our other siblings. Over time we alternated our family gatherings between South Bend and Washington, DC, where my older sisters lived. My parents would pile us in the car for the 10 hour drive and eventually we would caravan as different ones of us traveled in from different places. In the years since I moved away from our hometown I have missed only one Christmas away from family; traveling back east from California six out of the seven years I lived out there.
I am grateful to have been able to connect with my siblings at holiday gatherings over the years. We stopped going to Mass as a family a number of years ago (it used to require reserving several pews for the 30-some people from three generations that once gathered), though a subset still goes each year. Many things have changed over time. After my mother’s death in 1995: some of the energy of the holiday celebrations seemed to diminish and after my father’s death in 2010 it diminished further. But for those of us who gather whenever and wherever we can, there is always laughter, love, and remembering. This year, as we did last year, we will likely gather in smaller, separate enclaves rather than as one large group. That makes me sad, though I am learning to accept it. I will miss my son, who will once again be stuck at work and unable to travel from California. So for the third Christmas in a row I will not be with him, and have not seen him since I left California a year ago September.
In a little over a week I will pick my daughter up from the airport and we will set out within a day or two of her arrival to purchase, set up, and decorate our Christmas tree. My creche–nativity set–has been set up on a shelf unit in my dining room since last Christmas; somehow baby Jesus and company never managed to make it back into the box. Over time it sort of got to be a joke, how my nativity set was still out for Valentine’s Day and then somehow through Easter and the summer. So now I’ll perhaps move them around a little bit, get out the various angel figurines that usually hang out around the creche and that part of the decorating will be finished.
I am grateful for many wonderful memories of Christmas past and am looking forward to preparing for Christmas present, and who knows what the future holds for Christmases yet to come. I am grateful to be part of a family who still wants to get together, where the next generation of nieces and nephews look forward to gathering with their cousins and aunties and uncle nearly as much as I do. At the end of the day, it simply doesn’t get better than that. And for that, I am exceedingly grateful.
