Where is God Showing up this Christmas? | A Virtual Pilgrimage for Advent & Christmas: Octave Day 5

Reflecting on family Christmas traditions and personal loss, Rachel invites us to notice how God’s presence and hope remain with us — whether our Christmas feels full of comfort and joy or marked by absence, change or loss.

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Transcript

When you think of the Christmas season, what comes to mind first? For me, it’s a sense of comfort and beauty. These moods are conveyed to me through my senses in a very Ignatian sort of way. It is the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of Christmas that first come to mind.

It’s the familiar and delicious taste of my Grandma Jean’s homemade sugar cookies — a recipe handed down for at least four generations. It’s the smell of hot wassail, a Fitzgibbon family favorite of mulled cider wafting from my dad’s stovetop. It’s the sight of the same little angel with the frilly dress topping the family tree. It’s the sound of my Grandma Phyllis’s favorite Andy Williams Christmas album, which my dad recorded onto a CD from her record so that we can still hear the same skip in the middle of the song.

Even though my grandmother and her album have been gone for over thirteen years now, or it’s the way my dad tries to hide his tears at the end of the 1951 film adaptation of A Christmas Carol, which we watch every Christmas Eve. While at first glance the things I’ve named — food, decorations, music, and movies — might sound secular, I believe they hold a deeper meaning worth pondering.

The beauty, comfort, and familiarity of our favorite Christmas traditions point to a deeper truth. They remind us who we are and whose we are. This is why Christmas is such a beloved season — even for those who do not believe in Christ or who no longer practice their faith. It’s the traditions: the favorite foods, the same people gathered around the table, ornaments handed down, the music that brings you right back to your earliest memories of Christmas, and hopefully a sense of belonging and being loved.

That is the grace in all of that tradition. It reminds us who we are within our family and our community. It can serve as a reminder of God’s unchanging nature — the constancy of our Christmases pointing to God’s constancy with us.

Perhaps this is where you find yourself this Christmas: basking in the glow of your Christmas tree, surrounded by loved ones, enjoying your favorite traditions together, attending your family’s Christmas Mass of choice that you go to every year. If this is where you are, rejoice. You are surrounded by reminders of God’s love and presence, aware of the way God has shown up day after day and year after year in the people and places that hold the most meaning in your life.

Take a moment to pause this reflection and name them. Thank God for these precious people and moments.

But what if this Christmas is different? Maybe someone is missing from the table this year — estranged from the family, separated by miles, or even separated by states of being. Maybe that favorite family recipe or heirloom ornament was lost. Maybe Christmas has you feeling more alone this year, longing for Christmases past when life felt more joyful.

This is where I found myself one Christmas. My parents were newly divorced. I was a young adult, but I felt like a child who had lost hold of her mother’s hand in the mall. I was disoriented about everything. Every ornament I pulled out of the box was painful to look at, reminding me of the twenty-plus years my mom and dad and brother and I had decorated the tree together as a family of four.

Being in my childhood home without my mother was a source of pain and grief. It did not feel like Christmas. And yet, somehow, I knew that God was not any less there with me. Somehow I felt that Mary — as a brand-new young mother in an unfamiliar town — might have had some understanding of how disoriented I felt.

The sight of the baby Jesus in the manger on display in my parish still comforted me. Some things remained, even though so much was different. The most important things remained — the universal symbols of Christmas: evergreen trees, candles in the darkness. They are meant to remind us that hope is not lost, that Emmanuel remains God with us always.

Not just two thousand years ago in a stable in Bethlehem, and not just in the memory of your own Christmases past, but here and now.

So I ask you, regardless of how you find yourself this Christmas: where is God showing up for you, in new or old ways?