Despite all the televised merriment, the Christmas season proves to be rocky emotional terrain for the elderly and for singles and survivors of just about any age. Many such people have more friends and family members who have passed on than they can count among the living. Even for religious people, belief in an afterlife as a safe harbor and reward for loved ones cannot quell the overwhelming feelings of loss and longing that swell unbidden with every Christmas carol in the heart of the person left behind.
Every tree ornament is imbued with the memory of someone long gone. Every cherished cookie recipe. Every worn Christmas stocking. The songs on the radio recall a happier holiday dinner or a trip home to a warm decorated house, now bulldozed or burned.
If you are young rushing from store to store, it is hard to imagine that a time will come when there is no one left for whom you need to buy a gift. I shop for nameless children for a local charity so I don't feel left out. In the department store, I stop at the men's counter, sniff the masculine colognes, close my eyes and remember better days. No point in buying any. All the men in my family are dead.
The holiday itself is a minefield of memories. There was the bone-chilling Christmas Eve we buried my uncle after he died of liver cancer. He wanted to go in the ground before Christmas Day because he didn't want to be a burden to anyone on Christ's birthday, so we stood on the hard ground in a stiff wind and said goodbye to him in accordance with his wishes. Or how about that first Christmas, Dad spent in the Alzheimer's facility locked ward where we were allowed to visit him ten minutes every hour.
So to many of us, the holidays are a time when it is not only difficult to find something about which to be cheerful, it is a period when it takes all your fortitude to stay on the rails of sanity and not go flying off into a snow bank of despair.
I find it helpful to avoid commercial Christmas as much as possible and concentrate on the bare facts of the Christmas Story. I remember an old barn on the farm where I grew up and imagine it as the manger. I stabled my horse in that barn and some of our chickens were kept there. My father also had his homing pigeons on the second level. Of course, there were mice and rats and hornets nests high in the rafters. If you were in the barn at dusk or after dark, the contented sounds of the old place would assert themselves. Rustlings in the straw, the gentle swish of my horse's tail, a pigeon's coo, creaking wood, a hen scratching her nest into shape, chortling as she worked, the flap of a barn owl's wing as he rose into the night. Simple, comforting sounds. Joseph and Mary would feel right at home.
The scene out the barn door is still. Black trees slumber beneath a quilt of stars. The moon bathes the field in a wan light that turns the dead grass silver. The wind provides the only animation, lifting the tree bows and tossing the leaves, which settle in its wake, as if it had never come their way. The stars are sharp in the velvet night. To contemplate them framed by the humble barn door is to be in perfect tune with the universe.
I am sure there were noisy places in Bethlehem. The interior of the Inn that turned Mary and Joseph away was packed with travelers who had been lucky enough to score a place to stay. Inside there would have been much merriment, raucous and strident as muzak at the mall. Loads of fleshy bodies too close together. Breath smelling of stale wine. Strangers rudely jingling coins and demanding refills. Altogether an awful place to give birth.
Far better the manger with its soft murmurings and the yeasty aroma of oats and corn. If you come into a world in a place like that, you can believe in peace and hope. Become their champion.
I go to the barn in my imagination to experience the real Christmas. It was not cheery in the manger. It was earthy and domestic, the only music, the noises of living things turning in for the night. The smells, not of potpourri, mulled wine and fruitcake, but of damp soil, warm fur and gently decaying straw.
In this plain atmosphere, I can feel my heartbeat join the subtle rhythm of the sounds and the silences, until I am one with this eternally recurring drama and, therefore, united with all the hearts that have gone before or will come after me. In the calm of the barn night, the pain of loss and fear of loneliness slip into the earth and seep away. I know my place. And the stars don't seem so far away.
