Merry Christmas from The Write Empath

Merry Christmas!

Are you feeling the Christmas spirit? Can you feel the peace and joy and love in your heart today? For me, Christmas has always felt magical, special somehow.

We were raised poor. My father was self-employed, but we didn’t have a lot of money. Christmas gifts were often things we needed like socks. An aunt and uncle with no children supplemented us with gifts perhaps to make up the difference for us. We always looked forward to the big box of gifts coming from Racine.

At no point, however, did I blame my parents for not being able to afford more expensive things themselves. I never wondered why my dad didn’t go to work a 9-5 job to bring more money into the house. I didn’t even understand that a regular working father was the norm. My father was always home when I needed him to be.

I accepted that being poor was our lot in life. I never thought there was a way to change it. Maybe it’s just because we weren’t alone in being poor. Our friends’ families were often in similar straits.

Even at Christmas time I never mourned the fact that we didn’t have money for new Christmas clothes or expensive toys and books and games. Christmas meant cookies which we never had any other time of the year. My mother hid them so we would have them at Christmas.

We loved to find the hiding place and sneak all the sugar coated pecan fingers. Being poor my mother would substitute walnuts for the pecans but we never knew the difference. They were still “melt in your mouth” good.

There were cut out sugar cookies, some with frosting on them. Chocolate chip cookies were a favorite. A refrigerator cookie called “3 in 1” which was a 3 part cookie with vanilla, chocolate and orange flavors, always went well.

We never bought a tree. For a few years my father picked up the leftover trees thrown out by the school after the school session had ended for Christmas vacation and that was our tree. We liked those trees because they still had tinsel on them. Living on 40 acres, he sometimes went out into our own forest to find a suitable tree.

We weren’t picky about the tree. As long as it was a pine tree we could decorate we were happy. We had boxes of glass ornaments and strings of lights with huge light bulbs. The night we decorated the tree was something to look forward to.

Christmas Eve as a child was a night we went to bed early so Santa could come. The next morning we went to Mass before we could open any gifts. As we grew older we started to attend Midnight Mass. When we came home we bought out the cookies.  We could indulge while we opened our gifts.

Christmas is never about the money. It’s not about the cost of the gifts. It’s not even about the gifts. Christmas is about LOVE. There’s a certain feeling of peace and love that radiates throughout the land on Christmas Eve night and carries through until the beginning of the new year.

As I have grown older I sense even stronger how much more Christmas is about love and giving and generosity. It’s about being with people we love. Family and friends become more precious and time with them is irreplaceable.

May God bless all of my readers now and throughout this new year to come.