Misplaced Christmas Magic

For many of us, our childhood Christmases were filled with a certain type of magic. For me, it smelled like cinnamon and coming snow and tasted like frosted sugar cookies and my grandma’s walnut fudge. It was found in the hazy glow of yellow-white lights and in the warmth of that giant 80s floodlight on the living room floor as my dad prepped to record the annual Christmas video. I can almost feel the sound of my heart racing and hear my tiny pencil scratching furiously in hopes that this time, my eight-year-old vocabulary would be enough to best my mom and aunt in a game of Scattergories. And of course, there were the presents.

At its best, Christmas is shimmery, transcendent, and filled with wonder. It smoothes over the rough, imperfect edges of our lives and transports us to another place. Christmas calls us toward the best versions of ourselves and into a flourishing world where love, peace, and joy abound.

But sometime around my college years, my Christmas magic went missing. If I’m really honest, it had been slowly, almost imperceptibly, draining out for years. The older I became, twinkling lights, holiday foods and festivities, and gifts just didn’t seem to do the trick for my broken heart, my anxieties about the future, and my growing knowledge of the brokenness in the world. 

And yet, I looked so forward to coming home for Christmas, with the secret mission of reclaiming that Christmas feeling. Year after year, I would enter the season with hopeful expectation, but was left with a sense of sadness and disappointment. It didn’t make sense. With the exception of wearing matching red and green plaid outfits with my twin brother and taking home a big haul of toys, nearly everything about our Christmas traditions had remained the same. It was me who was changing, but I didn’t yet have the words to name it.

A few years later, I became a mom. Maybe the magic will come back if I create it myself, I thought. So, I set out to start my own holiday traditions with our little family, and waited for the magic to come. And while watching my kids experience such joy at Christmas is so meaningful and fun, I still found myself sitting on my living room floor, surrounded by piles of crumpled up wrapping paper thinking, That was it?

For me, things changed when I stopped trying so hard to recover the magic I was missing and started becoming curious about what was happening in my heart. What I came to discover is that Christmas is filled with a lot of mixed emotions and unmet longings …

Read the full article at Grit & Virtue