When My Heart Finds Christmas

Mobile users: click here to see video

Like a lost little girl, it’s 2:30am and I am gazing at the lights of the Christmas tree, reflecting on the past year.  The green, the red.  The blues.  Friends lost and found, changes that crept up and left me with questions asked more so than answered. 

It’s a festive time, and the joy of the season always wins in the end, but it’s after the holiday parties, after the fun gatherings that I find myself in the light of my tree, darkness closing in.  Childlike twinkles that recall the past, a symbol of wishes and dreams.

The loss of innocence as when Santa Claus becomes just another myth.

The sun will dry my tears tomorrow, but tonight the moon will see them fall.  My love of all things Christmas – the colors, the warmth despite the crisp chill, the songs – becomes faint in the frosty night air.  It wages a battle within my heart, gingerbread wishes chased by charcoal sketches, haphazardly drawn on faded paper thoughts.

         

I miss my family.  The loud holidays, the inviting smells that filled Grandma’s house, the shuffling of relatives in and out the door.  Cameras flashing to capture a memory.  Seasons when camaraderie triumphed over intolerance. 

Today I am missing my sister, and am discovering my brother.  Remembering my mother, and looking for my father.  I am sad for what has been lost, and thankful for what’s been found.

I have a friend with whom many hours have been spent recently.  Busy hours talking, quiet hours sitting.  This has been a gift that didn’t need a pretty ribbon to be meaningful.  Calm that I have found, and that I hope has been given.   Out of the blue this came, as though not a day had passed from the last confession to the first.

Candy canes are whispering in my ear, promising sweet thoughts, yet there is a sharp bite that forewarns me.  When the tree comes down, the lights are dark again for another year, and the ornaments packed carefully away, winter settles in.  A white blanket falls over the red and green, the silver and the gold.

A white shadow.  

Wonderings of what lies ahead sparkle around me like the shimmering champagne raised in a well-meaning toast.  But champagne loses its glow, and by the end of the blue dawn, so has the new year.  

Thoughts to be drowned out by cinnamonny cider and melting snowflakes. 

Pictures blaze before me like stars in the night sky.  Random scenes from a forgotten life.  Faded snapshots of a wanted dream.  Longing to fit into the memories, and the need to run from them.

My tired eyes are slowly closing as the green branches of the tree blur in a haze of midnight.  Why does Christmas seem so much more magical after the night has fallen?  And why is it chased so quickly into the clouds like dashing reindeer?

Tossing my wishes into the air like pinecones and holly berries, for the tiniest of seconds there is a glimmer of hope.  Hope that I can skate away on the river beneath me without falling through the thin icy layers.

I told someone tonight that I had faith in very few things.  Questions abound.  I have faith, however, that these familiar feelings will find me while I sit quietly by the chimney, waiting for a new revelation to arrive on the hearth. 

I have faith that another year will pass by as swiftly as the last.  And I have faith that change will drift in like the flurries of yesterdays. 

Time to turn out the lights for another evening.  Daylight will arrive soon and this sleepy girl wants to fall into a bed of sugarplum dreams, even when she is frightened to find only empty footsteps in the snow.

“All the days are kind to me, but fall too far behind to see, but when my heart finds Christmas, I hope it finds you too…”