Glass bulbs, ribbons, and carol song books

I sit here looking up at the fir tree bedecked with lights, ornaments and holiday cards. I scan the piles of wrapped gifts and train set below. Behind me the electric fireplace replicates the open fire. My husband sleeps on the couch, his snores a quiet and steady refrain.

All the trappings of a festive holiday. Earlier we watched a holiday themed movie of small town perseverance, redemption, kindness and overcoming obstacles to happiness and love. We drank our kahlua and cream from ivy trimmed glassware. I even closed the evening by caroling a host of Christmas tunes. The day is what Christmas Eve epitomizes to me, and I am happy, if not quite joyful.

The lead up to Christmas fills me with anticipation and spirit. I love selecting and wrapping gifts, some home-made, others store bought. I thrill to make specialty treats. I enjoy folks gathering at my house for companionship and refreshments. I hang string-a-long lights in my yard and trim the house with decorations.

Yet the closer to Christmas Day, the more that anticipation and glee is mingled with nostalgia and a subtle hue of longing, loneliness, and loss. Ambivalent emotions swirl inside, shifting quickly at times, flaring into a moment of anger that is not actually anger but sadness finding an outlet less vulnerable.

I am not unhappy, yet I do feel sorrow. The sorrow is not for a person, but for a time, a place... no that is not exactly right. Even then, on Christmas eves in the living room, surrounded by family unwrapping gifts one at a time so as to prolong the experience and enable individual recognition of thoughtfulness and togetherness, I still felt the mingled emotions.

I suppose it is my very sentimentality that creates the paradox of anticipation versus experience. To look forward with such hope, such open-heartedness, creates a space where disappointment, vulnerability, and awareness of the fleeting nature of it all.

This reads as maudlin, I am sure, on a night of cheer and goodwill. But there it is – life, all messy and mingled: happiness, sorrow, joy, grief, anticipation, exaltation, disappointment, misunderstanding, hope, love. They are not binary concepts or mutually exclusive. Humans are complex. Emotions are complex and multi-faceted. Would that I could attend only to the light, but then I would miss much depth that life has to offer.

As I prepare for bed, I reflect on how grateful I am for the abundance in my life. How lovely it is to be warm and well fed. How luxuriant to be able to exchange a gift of worldy goods with my love in honor of the season. How marvelous to sing and be silly together. How magnificent to be tender and quiet and gaze at the tree while we think of loved ones far away. How comforting to share the complex emotions of life.