Wrangler Dani

I haven’t written much about Christmas this year (unlike most years, when i inundate the Internet with sappy posts about love and snow) and until now, I didn’t really know why. I just haven’t felt like it, is the short answer, but the longer answer is that Christmas, for me, has become about a cult of feeling instead of an understanding of what it’s really about.

This realization came crashing down on me with clarity this morning, when the holiday weekend is over and Adam is back at work and I’m also back to work (1500 words due by this weekend, y’all. That actually have to sound intelligent , is the catch). I felt all normal and emotionally stable until I saw this picture of my tousle-headed brother and his little brother-in-law and promptly began to cry, surprising myself with my own emotion.

I left the wilds of Eastern Oregon almost ten years ago and haven’t lived there for any length of time since – but it’s still home. And this Christmas was the first year I’ve EVER not made it Home for Christmas. I’ve spent many a Thanksgiving with my adopted family, the Holmes in Coppell, Texas (oh and Easters and any other weekend I could make an excuse to go) and I’ve spent school years in Texas, summers in Central Oregon and since being married, Adam and I have spent several holidays with his awesome family  in California and Texas – but I’ve never not gone back to Ye Olde Homestead for Christmas.

So this year, we’ve known for months that we wouldn’t be able to go home. And I’ve taken it with characteristic strength and inner courage – one moment bemoaning my fate and the next attempting to cook my way out of homesickness – which we all know seldom works. Despite my “courage”, we had a lovely holiday – Adam and I helped with all three of our church’s Christmas Eve services, and we had a great Christmas morning, extravagantly buying each other backpacks and North Face jackets and John Wayne movies and politically-charged reading material, and finishing off the day with surf fishing and a lovely (though rather cold) walk on the beach. It was great and cheery and I felt so, so lucky to have my best friend/love of my life here to help me celebrate a non-Oregonian Christmas.

So, you say, “why the tears? why are you still pouting about this… you with your handsome husband and walk on the beach?”

The honest answer is that I’m still pouting because I’ve lost Christmas. Somewhere in the yearly tradition of snow and mountains and doggies and “momma cookin’ too much for supper” I’ve forgotten why Christmas matters in the first place. It doesn’t matter because families get together or because people are generous or because we drink hot cocoa and throw snowballs at each other every year. It matters because it urges us to do those things – not because they in themselves will save us, but because the message of Christmas is one that reorients us, that answers our questions and that makes it all worth it.

I’ve been thinking about it all wrong – that Christmas is diluted for me this year because I’m not comfortable with it and not feeling it, when in fact the opposite is true. Christmas is all the more powerful in the discomfort, in the realization that we are not “home”. Christmas isn’t about a sanitary story – a happy family and a giggling baby and a clean, comfortable world that just needed a few angels singing in the sky to make it all right.

Christmas is about bringing good into a world that desperately needs it and a God who sees us and reaches down to us whether we want Him or not. Christmas, in the end, is not even about feelings – it’s about clinging to “tidings of comfort and joy” even when those things seem about as far removed from reality for us as the angel Gabriel showing up in our bedroom. In the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life” George Bailey isn’t singing Christmas carols because his problems are solved – he’s still trapped in his “crummy little office” in Bedford Falls, but he sings because there’s an eternal truth that carries him even though the silvery, shiny wrappings that we’re trained to expect at Christmas might never appear.

I’m so blessed. Blessed because even when Christmas is not all tinsel, when I surprise myself with my own disappointment or when my expectations get the best of me – Christmas still tells a story of redemption. It’s about a God who redeems even when I run away, of a Savior who was born into our mess, of a story that irrefutably hopeful and joyous despite less-than-ideal circumstances.

I don’t think I’ll ever feel “Home for Christmas” anywhere but the mountains of Oregon, but I’m OK with that. My longing for home only reminds me that the best is yet to come – and isn’t that what Christmas is all about?