Thoughts about story hummed all through yesterday, story not as diversion or means of making sense but as lifeline.  

It had been a black morning I couldn’t shake, with blue bite marks on my arm from special-needs Sadie and my stirred-up spirit not letting go of the violent storm. I shook my fists at the thief, the unnamed neurological thing that robs smiling, delighted child and brings a shadow of angst and impulse and then confused regret. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” I rock her in my arms, I know, I know.

My insides felt raw, burned and scarred, not unlike after a bad high school breakup. (Note to self: Let me not belittle my teenage girls’ heartaches when they come. The feelings are dire, even if the circumstances are not.)

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Warning: Christmas cheer not included.

The phone rings the day after Christmas, Boxing Day, in between setting the teakettle to whistling and dealing another game of rummy. Mom comes out of her bedroom with a box of Kleenex—a dear friend has died at 48 years old. Her mother has waited to call until after the holiday, even though it happened a week ago.

What is one to think about a quick-witted girl with a crown of strawberry blonde hair and a smattering of freckles who could stay up all hours talking books and ideas but who was troubled always and ultimately drank herself to death? What sense is to be made? God’s on His throne, but this doesn’t feel like His plan. (My feelings on the subject are worthless, I know.) God gives us free will—can we miss the plan He has for us? Is that what happened here?

There are more questions than answers.  This uneasy place is breeding ground for the familiar feeling of wanting to grip tight and take charge. What if she’d been my sister, my best friend? She was sick, so sick. Couldn’t someone have made her get help? I recognize the fallacy of this thinking as fast as the thoughts come. I’m such a fixer. Is this a good thing or a control thing?

Where does one draw the line between faith moving mountains, doing for the least of these, pouring out mercy—and just plain meddling, trying to butt heads with Management?

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The kitchen has been covered with a fine dusting of flour and glitter all week, and I found Frasier fir needles on my pillowcase this morning. (Climbing under the tree with a watering can has its hazards—I’ve been wearing pine all month.)

We were getting ready to take Christmas on the road. I confessed to the family after an hour or so of huffing about that it’s hard to shut down the house, topping off vases overflowing with holly and packing cookies into tins, saying good-bye to the dear sights of home until after December 25. Once I’m on the other side (at my parents’ house in the mountains), I’m more than okay with being away for Christmas. In fact, I’m delighted.

There are tins full of cookies I didn’t make, a Christmas beast waiting in the fridge, gifts under the tree, and all the homey touches and traditions I was raised on. Best of all are the faces greeting us at the door.

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I was thinking January-ish thoughts the other day, like gee this bathmat is tattered and I should replace it. White sale!

My jeans sure are feeling tight—I’ll have to either give up sweets or buy new jeans—in January. The dentist called to confirm an appointment for next month. The expiration date on the three cartons of heavy cream in the fridge is for 2012.

How can this be? It’s not even here, but Christmas feels almost over.

This is when I really need to hunker down and focus on Jesus. The parties are behind me, the decorating, the wonderful whirlwind of it all. It’s time for family and family and more family. (The kids are out of school for weeks, and I’m glad. Mostly.) It’s not my birthday, it’s not my birthday…

How was your Christmas? People ask this well into the new year. My Christmas? At some level, Christmas just is.

In my efforts to have the best, holiest, most wonderful time of the year, I lose sight of the unchangeable. Love came down and put on humility and lived and died for us. For me.

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I can’t remember a worse December
Just watch those icicles form!
What do I care if icicles form?
I’ve got my love to keep me warm.
~ Irvin Berlin
 

I sent an email this afternoon to my husband, my groom, the man of my dreams:

Hey, have you seen the lint-brush?

As I hit SEND, I shook my head. Is this what it’s come to?

Before we were married, I remember missing that boy at Christmas like crazy. The day wasn’t quite complete without him, but I tried not to pout. I might’ve pouted a little. I waited for the phone to ring (this was back before cell phones or free long distance). One year, a few months before we got engaged, I had my hopes up during a pre-Christmas visit. Over a romantic meal, he presented me with… a sweater. A grey sweater.

Still, things were so holding-hands-at-the-Nutcracker back then.

Seventeen years later, I’m still madly in love with The Spouse. But I send him emails about lint-brushes, and we stay up late Christmas Eve snapping at each other while we wrap a few last-minute gifts for the kids. There are slippery spots we fall down on every year, like packing the car to go to my parents’ (Luke calls my pile of clothes “Mt. St. Laura’s”).

We even argue on the way to dinner parties sometimes. I’m in a red dress, he’s dressed in his best suit, we smell good. What’s there to fight about? But we can air grievances all the way from our driveway to the hosts’, and some of our friends live almost an hour away. (Friends: You know who you are. Don’t we do a good job of smiling pretty despite the fuss we’ve just had?)

Mostly we’re just worn out: “You want to get  Sadie up? I got her up last time,” or, “Could you take the dogs out while I wipe this puddle off the floor?”

But my husband likes to remind me we’re not roommates, two people who live together to share chores and expenses. And he’s right.

This Christmas I’m going to try to remember how I ached when he was eating coconut cake in Georgia while I was eight hours north in Kentucky. I’m going to count myself a lucky girl because we get to be in the same room at the same time, watching our children open gifts we bought and wrapped together (more or less). We get to travel in the same car, eat the same holiday food, sleep in the same bed. We get to reminisce about Christmases past and look forward to Christmases to come. We get to clink our glasses, wink at each other from across a relative-filled room, share an armchair if there’s a shortage of seats. And if we happen to find ourselves under a sprig of mistletoe…

Last night, after we each had a crazy busy day (is there any other kind?), we met for a drink at a favorite restaurant before the twins’ orchestra concert. We had 25 minutes to reconnect. I’m not sure that was enough, but it was something. And later, during the seventh grade’s rendition of “Feliz Navidad,” we held hands.

I can’t add much to this little dandy by The Spouse. As much as I enjoy parties and visits to church and being with friends, I do love Christmas on the homefront best. I will say that children are at their chattiest at Christmastime. I cherish some of the things they come up with. We’re still laughing at this one from when Maggie was younger: “Jesus can’t bring presents at Christmas. But Santa can.” This year Sadie has sympathy for Rudolph (weren’t the the other reindeer and Santa himself perfectly beastly on account of a red nose?). Sadie goes around saying (overly) sadly, “Poor Rudolph.” There’s only one thing she wants you to reply: “Yes, poor Rudolph.”  

My wife loves Christmas—and not in the everyday, run-of-the-mill way a lot of people love it. No, Laura loves Christmas with a consuming intensity that leaves her blue when it is over.

For example, Laura enjoys Christmas music so much that she imposes on herself an absolute embargo on playing it before Thanksgiving. Unless, of course, she really needs a pick-me-up a few days (or weeks) early. Then, the embargo goes out the window, at least long enough for a King’s College Choir disc or two.

My wife loves decorating for Christmas, too, even when she must do the same thing more than once. She dresses our mantle with magnolia leaves and pine fronds, replacing pieces as they turn brown.

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The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
but I have promises to keep.
And miles to go before I sleep,
and miles to go before I sleep.
~ Robert Frost 

The trouble with today, a rainy day spent almost entirely at home, wasn’t about tinsel or ribbons or shopping on-line. There was some of that, but there was lots of wiping up dog vomit (which The Spouse stepped on in the dark this morning), laundry, general damage control. There was no reading, no writing, no nap—and on a wonderfullly dreary day with such potential.

People were killed 70 year ago today, and it mattered. They barely mentioned Pearl Harbor in school, the girls report. I can’t say I thought about it enough, although it haunts. 

Instead I filled my head with the here and now. I had the idea we needed a real family meal tonight and asked if The Spouse could try, just try, to make an appearance by 6-ish. He got stuck in a meeting, so I chopped onions while Sadie tugged at my sleeve. I didn’t want to be sad or mad or discouraged—again. So I wiped my onion-tears and stomped back to the bedroom and straightened it up, then laid Luke’s housecoat and newly arrived issue of Star Wars Insider on the bed, with his bedroom shoes neatly on the floor beside it. There. I couldn’t be grumpy when he came in now.

The house is brimming with small touches here and there, our tokens of birthday love. It will look so sparse in January, I thought while I tied fat red satin ribbon on a hanging lantern in my grey bedroom. But there will be more writing in January—and maybe a writing nap or two.

I wanted to run out after supper tonight and get my toenails painted red for a party tomorrow night. But I glanced at the clock while I dried the last dish—the ladies who work at the nail salon are home soaking their feet by now.

Good for them, and good for me. I’ll wear closed-toe shoes. We’ve got Christmas carols playing on CD, and the teens are for once not studying but playing with their collection of flower fairy ornaments in front of the fire. The dogs are snoring and the grown-ups are banging away on keyboards. At least we’re all in the same room.

There’s a perfect storm of parties over the next four days, one of which I’m hosting. Hanging in my closet are dresses that still fit reasonably well despite a few extra pounds. They are pressed and brushed pet hair-free, my red shoes got a good polish this afternoon, and it’s supposed to be cold enough to wear a coat—and maybe even the black fur muff I bought at the end of last winter. It’s all delightful, but exhausting.

I’m rambling, I know. I guess I’m saying I’m blessed by being able to bend. By being kind of okay with letting go of expectations and being given the grace to choose the better (housecoat and magazine instead of sour face; hearth instead of red toenails).  I’m trying to remember that it’s not my birthday in December.

There’s bad tired (in spirit) and good tired (in body). There’s no ache in me that can’t be fixed with a long, hot bath. With a book.

May you find time for the same.

It is day three of December, and already I bring you a re-post, and a guest one at that. (I’m tuckered out.) Today we put up our tree. It’s one of my favorite days of the year, despite the brief tantrum The Spouse throws every time. In the middle of the angst of Luke getting the tree in and up and such, we ended up laughing our heads off. Here are his thoughts on the annual ordeal from several years back, which were published in a local magazine, shared by The Spouse in a Georgia Public Radio commentary, and first posted here in 2010. 

This holiday season, millions of American men will face the ultimate Yuletide challenge, a task far more difficult than buying for the wife at the last minute or putting together maddeningly complicated toys in the wee hours of Christmas morning.

I’m referring, of course, to the very tricky business of handling the oversized Christmas tree. Picking it out. Bringing it home. Putting it up. Taking it down. Getting it out. Oh, Tannenbaum, indeed!

Don’t panic, though: I’m here to help. And not as some sort of puffed-up fix-it guru. No, I’m just a regular guy, looking to help you take care of a perennial holiday headache with as little pain as possible.

Clearly, the best way to handle the plus-sized Christmas tree is to avoid one altogether. This is neatly accomplished by offering to pick up (and pick out) the tree by yourself, as a seemingly thoughtful gesture to the woman in your life. This allows you to score a smallish tree without looking like a wimp.

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“The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving, ‘mythical’ in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe…There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true…” – J.R.R.  Tolkien , ‘On Fairy Stories’

I was huffing and puffing my way through a whirlwind cleaning of the twins’ bedroom, not particularly pleased with the books and dirty socks and ballet bags on the floor—or their owners. Just when I was sure the purpose of my thirteen-year-old daughters’ existence was to make messes expressly for me, I stumbled across a spiral notebook, sitting open on Maggie’s nightstand. I dropped my armful of stuff and sat and read her words, apparently written late one night after we watched Pirates of the Caribbean. What a sweet way for God to pierce through my martyr-of-the-moment syndrome…

Dear Jesus,

I’ve figured it out! Thank the makers of Pirates of the Caribbean.

This life is a real action story about princesses and a Prince, sons and a Father—and the best part is,  it’s absolutely, 100 percent true. I’m living in a fairy tale, devoted to my True Love.

My name is Princess Margaret. My goal is to bring honor and fame to the One who rescued me. The King came to this faraway land with a purpose, which was to save the ones He loved, even if that meant He would be killed. The Rescuer would have still let those (whom He made) abandon Him on the island (which He created) if it could save their souls. He still would have done it if it were only me. That bring tears to my eyes at this very moment, knowing someone out there loves me that much. He is so humble and gracious.

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“I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time—waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God—it changes me.” ~ Jack

Yesterday contained all the ingredients of a Jonah day: a marathon schedule bookended by meetings, with a doctor’s appointment stuck in the middle. Add a dash of an annoying bank error and a smidgeon of humiliation, and, voila: one big stress sandwich.

First was Sadie’s annual Individualized Educational Plan, where I’m told the goals set for her at school. I brought something baked and hoped for the best. Noticing a box of tissues in the center of the conference table, I thought about the moms who’ve told me they cry during IEPs. I guess things don’t always go smoothly.

But I’m always humbled by the team of teachers and therapists sitting around telling me what they do for Sadie, the ways they love her. Yesterday their faces shone with the fact that our girl is back after a year of being in a seizure-induced fog, isolated and alone and angry and scared. She is delighted and delightful and in our faces and full of funny things to say and do.

We talked about last year versus now, and I wondered how we made it through, how I didn’t walk around sobbing. I would search Sadie’s eyes for spark and find none. I would hit the steering wheel with my fists and talk “Do you remember when she could…” with The Spouse. I don’t want to go back there, but I know the other shoe could drop any minute.

I almost needed a tissue.

I got in my car and remembered to remember there was grace, and it doesn’t run dry.

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