Message in a Bottle 20
Maggie and Oliver are talking to me again.
Sam and Alex too.
It’s my Christmas story again, stomping off the snow on her boots, and knocking a merry rhythm on the door, come to visit with rosy cheeks and holly tangled in her hair.
Last year I was frustrated at how little progress I make on this story every year.
This year I’m grateful for my Christmas companions. They’ve become like old friends I get together with over the holidays. They always help me get in the Christmas spirit. Snowfield is a space where I parse out my tangled Christmas thoughts and there are many of them.
This year it’s a lot of this idea that I can’t make anyone have more Christmas cheer than they already do.
I look around year after year and get so sad to see less and less people celebrating. Even those that do, seem to have lost that spark. I think some of us close ourselves off to Christmas, cause sometimes Christmas hurts. The end of the year, the time we look at how much has changed. Sometimes it’s too much. It’s overwhelming, heartbreaking even. A loved one no longer with us. A dream come and died. Other times change is the one thing we want and the one thing we just don’t see. Another Christmas rolls around and you realize a whole year has gone by and everything is the same.
Stuck. You claim the word like it’s your only friend and not the exact opposite.
For me it’s always a little bit of both. Change is hard. But the things I want to change always seem to stay the same.
I know I’m a wheel in that machine. I have to spin one way or the other if I want something to happen.
But Christmas uncovers it all, like blood against snow, whether I’m moving or not, spinning or collecting cobwebs.
Maggie’s a little like me that way. She doesn’t understand why her town, her neighbors don’t look like the Christmases she reads in stories. Maggie is fed up with longing for Christmas cheer on every street corner and only seeing bleak winter. She thinks if she tries hard enough she can force Christmas on Snowfield. Even if she has to do it single-handedly, Maggie is determined to make everyone around her feel the Christmas spirit.
I hope one of these years you’ll be able to read and find out how well that turns out for her. But until then, I’m going to work on my own Christmas cheer, pondering on the greatest gift ever given. From God to humanity. His only Son. Jesus Christ. A Savior. A light to the world.
Merry Christmas!
-Ellie
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