Comfort and joy

The twelve days of Christmas offer soul space

Taking a deep breath, exhaling a few seconds later, a sense of peace settling in my soul. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 2025 are history. For those like me who observe the Christian calendar, we have now entered the twelve days of Christmas. Contrary to the bowdlerized commercialism that tells us “the twelve days” are a countdown before Christmas Day, they are actually a continuing celebration of the season’s good news, leading up to January 6th, when the Church observes Epiphany.

As a pastor, I have always found the lead-up between Thanksgiving and Christmas week to be pretty intense. Expectations are high, schedules are full, people are increasingly frantic, until finally Christmas Eve arrives. The Christmas Eve service is a marker that all that could be done has been finished, and anything left unfinished will need to fade away with the immediate approach of Christmas Day. By the end of the Christmas Eve service, most of us breathe a sigh of relief, coupled with gratitude that we are within hours of a big celebration, anticipating the quiet that comes on December 26th.

In most of the churches I have served over the years, the week between Christmas and New Years is very quiet, and in some places (including where I am now pastoring) we close the office for that period of time, honoring the need for everyone to have some restful time from the church. There are always stalwarts who by choice or necessity have church-related tasks to accomplish during this time, but typically they do not need an opened office for that to occur.

Over the years, Claudia and I learned to use this week as a time for personal connection and spending time prayerfully contemplating the ensuing new year. Last year she and I spent the morning together in the Christian Life Center of the congregation I was serving at the time. We broke the morning into segments, with moments of shared conversation, time alone to receive God’s guidance, culminating in an hour or so together making specific plans for time away, work-related commitments and travels “back home.”

I will continue this practice, although it is now a more solitary venture, a period of protracted consideration between Love’s presence and myself. In the next few days I will take a couple of family-related short trips to visit those I haven’t seen in some time, interspersed with quiet moments when I try to wrap up 2025 things and make plans for 2026. I am so grateful to have these days when all the world around me seems to honor the need for mutual flexibility and corporate laxity regarding schedules and commitments.

For me, so busy as I am between Thanksgiving and Christmas, now is when I begin to find the comfort and joy spoken of in the well-known Christmas carol. Yesterday’s celebration was the quietest I’ve had in years, but I was able to find joy in visiting with one of my sons and his wife, who spent the night on Christmas Eve. We luxuriated in the warmth of my fireplace, glanced frequently at the lights on the Christmas tree and, when my other two local sons arrived, opened gifts together, ate my homemade cinnamon and peanut butter rolls, and relaxed together. We talked about Claudia, processed some of our angst concerning our new lives without her physical presence and found comfort with one another.

Today I will join my daughter, her husband and their two children, at one of my area son’s homes, where we will exchange gifts, eat pizza and observe the young children enthralled with the holiday. Once upon a time I thought these gatherings to be obligatory and only partially meaningful, but I have reached the stage of life where every moment with my children or grandchildren or people I love is a gift. Knowing just how suddenly life can change, I am learning to value every shared moment I have. Whether I live another six months or another thirty years, I want to immerse myself in what truly supports life and causes it to flourish.

I had another vivid dream with Claudia last night, and although I cannot remember the details, I awakened with tears in my eyes, a mixture of gratitude for days past and grief for what cannot be any longer. To fill the empty pockets in my soul, I am learning to see unusual happenings as moments of connection with her. Every few days a Christmas bulb will fall from my tree and bounce to the floor for no apparent reason. “Thanks for the reminder, Claudia, that you are with me, even though I no longer see you.” Reading quietly in my sun room, the outside winds will cause the memorial chimes to tinkle. “I hear you, old girl. I wish you were here. I miss you terribly. I can’t believe you’re really gone.” I glance at the Christmas tree, see the brilliant red cardinal crystal ornament I received as a gift from my aunt who lost her husband within weeks of Claudia’s death. “We had so many days of beauty and light, didn’t we? I’m going to try to live with hope. Thanks for what you taught me about that.”

There was a time when I would have viewed someone offering me this grief narrative as unreasonable, illogical and too preoccupied with loss. These days, though, I see it quite differently. I am simply a widower in his early 60s trying to make sense of the way ahead, remembering the relationship that changed my life so completely over the course of three decades. I’m not psychologically maladjusted or chronically depressed.

I’m simply finding comfort and joy in what Love offers me. It’s not much, and it’s not what I would have chosen, but it’s what I have, so it’s enough.

It has to be. And it is.

For now.