“This time of year is the most painful.”
~Charles DickensChristmas Carol
My daughter is crying. “He’s fat and red!” says Jess. We’re driving down a four-decker road in my sports car. “Who are you, sweetie?” I ask. “Him!” she sobs. “He comes to our house late at night. You have to fight him!
Jess is 4 years old. She often sees me teaching adult self-defense classes. She isn’t as afraid of home invasions as she is of the idea that I might end up in jail. “Santa isn’t coming in!”
Park your car and turn off your holiday music. “Jess, baby, Santa isn’t real,” I said, surprised that I’d spilled the beans. She stopped, her tears glinting in the car’s dome lights. “He’s just on TV and on the news. We all go because it’s fun.” And just like that, she grins. “Okay, Dad! Let’s go!”
Another single parent tragedy has been averted. At least for 1992.
The next Christmas season, Jess turns five years old and is ready to believe in Santa again. Fear of an overweight intruder in regal attire is, well, sugar plum Dancing inside her head. Jess’s mother chastises me for telling the truth too soon. My friends are disgusted.
Except for one thing.
Bob is the same age as me. He and his wife have no children. Instead, they work as Santa and his elves at a local department store. Bob is not exactly skinny, but he has a pleasant deep voice and a red suit that is the envy of the local community theater.
“So she was scared last year, it just happened,” he says over lunch. “You did the right thing. You told the truth to some crying children.” Then Bob gets an idea. We plot over steaming mugs of hot cocoa.
That weekend, Jess and I drive to Bob’s house. When we arrived, he was wearing Kris Kringle regalia. “I’m not really Santa,” he said to my five-year-old son, who was rolling his eyes. “I’m just a helper,” he said, pointing to the antenna towering above the roof. “Kids tell me what they want, what they want to see, they write to me, and I hang it up. yay It’s there for the reindeer to reach. ”
Almost on cue, the elf opened the front door and said: “Who wants chocolate chips?” We clean inside and sit in the living room near a small alcove. Bob is an amateur radio enthusiast (the real reason he installed the antenna was because he was an adult). In the middle of drinking milk and cookies, the phone rang.
“Santa One to Santa 382, please come in.”
These memories can make holidays without your daughter miserable. But the opposite is also true.
Bob replies: “This is 382. I read it.” Soon Santa One announces that Prancer has just arrived with the latest letter that Bob and his wife left for collection. “Mrs. Klaus is going through them right now,” he explains. Jess is in awe. Then Santa 382 asked her, “Do you want to talk to Santa?” and she almost cried. This year I meant it in a good way. genuine Santa. Bob arranged the entire show with a friend from Ohio.
But Christmas isn’t over yet for Jess.
On Christmas Eve, Jess and her mother arrive home from school when a sheriff’s deputy arrives. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he called out from his patrol car. “We have some news for you little ones,” he explained as they tracked Santa at the station. His sled will fly over Asia and arrive in South Carolina later tonight. “Just in time for little girls to get their presents,” he laughed as he walked away.
Jess spends Christmas that year with her mother and grandmother. Around midnight, with my mother’s permission, I sneaked over and sowed feed corn on the back porch, creating a hoof-shaped clod of mud. This is the final piece of evidence that brings Santa back to the girl’s childhood.
Jess was 26 years old when she passed away in 2015. As an adult, she told me she understood why I had revealed the truth when I was four years old. And why did he have such a hard time the following year? “I knew it was pretend play,” she said. “But I believed Dad.”
These memories can make holidays without your daughter miserable. But the opposite is also true. Dust off each one as if it were a precious gift. Christmas becomes even more precious when you remember it.
I thank God for that; christmas carol.
Travel with me now to another holiday season, as Scrooge followed a kind spirit back in time. November 29, 1988, 1:06 p.m. After 42 hours of grueling labor, Jess’s mother gives her final push surrounded by hospital staff. The doctor waved me over. Dressed, gloves on, mask on, I shook her hand and brought my daughter into this world.
After the checkup, I hold the little girl in my arms because her mother was too tired to support baby Jess. I didn’t know until this moment that gratitude and praise were the same thing. “Thank you, Lord, look at her,” I whisper. “Look at her, oh dear God, dear God.”
We own exactly one VHS tape. christmas carol (1984) Starring George C. Scott. Jess’s mother and I have watched this movie many times, usually alone, while rotating late night shifts with our little girl. To this day, her mother says she will never watch that show again. Not me.
I watch because Jess died. christmas carol Every year. It’s the little traditions that make the holiday season easier. In this way, memory is a good thing. But it can also be very bad.
We may choose realistic and useful memories that will enrich our vacation. Memory is our ally in this regard.
Memory is sometimes a fickle, capricious, unwelcome guest. Augustine He may have been on to something when he lamented, “Great and terrible is the power of memory, O my God, deep and infinitely diverse.” It’s easy to focus on the many failures. I have many shortcomings in fatherhood, which I recall with a pounding heart, and which are more harmful than futile.
There is no solution or hope in worrying about mistakes that cannot be changed. Rather, the relationship with the dead may change as follows: love during separationsays philosopher Thomas Attig: We may choose real and useful memories that will enrich our vacation. Memory is our ally in this regard.
Ruth Malkinson and Liora Bartul of Tel Aviv University say that bereaved parents can recreate details of their children’s lives with surprising clarity. this phenomenon It occurs for the rest of your life. Two other researchers, University of New South Wales psychologists Fiona McCallum and Richard Bryant, found that personal memory unified framework Grief helps us understand ourselves and our attachments, promoting positive coping responses.
“I would like to believe that God’s primary purpose in giving us memory is to enable us to act freely. go back to the past” says author and theologian Frederick Büchner. “So even if you didn’t get those roles right the first time around, you can now try again.” This is not a matter of self-deception, it’s about removing the power of memory over us, allowing grief and reconciliation. This is an opportunity to do so, he added.
Büchner was 10 years old when his father took his own life in 1936. For decades, when asked how his father died, Büchner avoided what would be considered an embarrassing truth and instead mumbled something. heart problems. This led to suppressed emotions, anxiety, and guilt. He confesses that it was only in his middle age that death became so real that he began to cry. He finally realized that when Jesus saidWhen he says, “Do this in remembrance of me,” he is not suggesting a journey down a path of misery. Rather, Buchner writes, memory “allows us to recall the dead past.” living present”
We maintain healthy emotional and spiritual bonds through memory and ritual.
When I look at it christmas carolpast and present combine in a moment that is both immediate and timeless. This may be the closest we come to understanding eternity in a world enslaved to time. “Such great knowledge is beyond me and too high for me to reach,” the bereaved father wrote king david. “Where can I go to escape from your Spirit? Where can I run from your presence?” Researchers call this the anticipatory aspect of “mourning.” unified time. There is no Professor Robert Weiss (University of Massachusetts) explains the relationship between the number of years since death and the strength of memory, intensity of grief, and depth of love.
This may be one reason why grief takes such a toll. Is it worth it? Holocaust Survivor Elie Wiesel “Suffering contains the secrets of creation and its eternal dimension. God awaits us at the end of suffering and mystery.” struggle According to Barbara Thompson (Sage College) and Robert Neimeyer (University of Memphis), continuing a relationship with the deceased in the absence of physical presence is an important part of grieving. We maintain healthy emotional and spiritual bonds through memory and ritual.
christmas carol It’s just such a ritual for me. Watching this movie gives me the time and space to reflect on my first holiday season with Jess. In the words of Friedrich Rückert, who lost his two youngest children during the Christmas holidays of 1833-1834, it gives meaning to an eternally intertwined love.
What passes away is gone
apart: it remains essentially,
Even if it doesn’t feel that way. intertwined
forever
Memories of Scrooge christmas carol It merges past and present into one possible future. But salvation is not out of reach. As an act of repentance and mercy, Jacob Marley appears to be warning his former partner before losing everything. All of a sudden, we’re all about relationships. seems to be to end in death. The great surprise for Scrooge and for us was that love lingers in memory and hope, a fact Charles Dickens knew from painful experience.
On March 31, 1851, Dickens’ father John died at the age of 65. “I was there until he died – oh, it was so quiet,” he laments. “I hardly know what to do.” He pulled his mother into his arms and cried with her. Two weeks later, on April 14, while the popular author was speaking at a dinner party, his 9-month-old daughter Dora suffered a severe seizure and died almost instantly. Regret and sadness dominated his life that summer and into the holiday season.
“Keep your dear place in our Christmas hearts and by our Christmas fire, and in the season of immortal hope, and on the birthday of immortal mercy, we shut out there is nothing! ” Dickens wrote that December. “May the memories be acknowledged with gentle encouragement! They are timely and give us all their comfort and peaceful reassurance. And may the living and living beings be reunited on Earth as well. About the history. died”
I didn’t shut anything out either. Memories are painful, but I wouldn’t want to replace any of them, good or bad. I also reunite with the dead through mourning, tears, and prayers. When you cue up christmas carol Once again, I feel like my daughter is collapsing on the couch with me. free Except for the good tears. I believe in the promise of Christmas. I will go with you again. Santa may not be real, but Jess is.
“I honor Christmas in my heart and will continue to honor it all year round.
I live in the past, present, and future. The spirits of all three will strive within me. I’m not shutting out the lessons they teach. ”
~Charles Dickens christmas carol
