Making Christmas Memorable in a Year Best Forgotten

Posted on Oct 29, 2020 Topic : Inspirational/Devotional, Men's Christian Living, Women's Christian Living
Posted by : Rachel McMillan

Christmas is my favorite time of year and while I need it this year more than any other, I am also aware of how its changes will make my usual celebrations and warm nostalgia feel different. I’ve always wanted to hold onto as long as possible. I want to revel in my yearly traditions and see loved ones and bask in taking out the ornaments that have been tucked away for most of the year. Watch my favorite films and listen to the songs that take me back to happy times in the past.

I want to be home. Indeed, in this year of all years we are rediscovering the magic of home. We have, in a moment of global empathy as a response to an unprecedented time, been forced to retreat into simplicity and to embrace home in a new way. For many, we have been locked down, encouraged to stay within bubbles and finding new joy in everything from board games and puzzles. Unable to retreat or travel with many working from home, this Christmas is the perfect time to forge new memories in a simple, grateful way but also to recognize that we cannot make Christmas the same as it has been –especially in a year that doesn’t look anything like Christmases past.

Yet, the wonderful thing about Christmas is that it doesn’t take a lot to make it magical. The ingredients you need to celebrate and remember its true meaning can be as unornamented as a Spotify playlist shared with favorite family and friends far away, or a slide show of pictures of loved ones far away. Sending a homemade card. Trying a new recipe.

But let us not be beholden to traditions that set up a sense of expectation or make way for disappointment. This year, if a tradition doesn’t make you happy, rather longing for Christmases past, why not use this outlier year to start a new one? If ornaments or recipes recall all that you’re missing in your traditional Christmas, why not give yourself the grace of skipping a year or shrugging off the weight of perceived standards?

One of the highlights of my new book is to use your favorite made-for-TV Christmas movies as a springboard to inspire new traditions. This might just be the year to think outside of the yearly box. Maybe instead of your usual jaunt to the Christmas tree lot, you order a sparkly pink one. Perhaps instead of the usual gift exchange around the hearth on Christmas Eve, you use the day to present all of the homemade things you cultivated during lockdown: sourdough starter? Knitting? Some arts and crafts from your unexpectedly homeschooled children?

Perhaps the traditions that we make when we are at our most vulnerable—when we need Christmas at its simplest will be the ones that stick. And next Christmas and for Christmases to come, we might end up finding that the Christmas in a time of adversity is more powerful than any that came previously.

This Christmas can so easily be stripped of the commercialism and bustle and stress, especially if we let ourselves off the hook and let its differences create something equally beautiful. If we use the time we might have running around trying to find the perfect gift to appreciate the moments where we have had to do with less. And as for home, let’s find a way to make it cozy. Let’s recapture the magic of it beyond the stress and expectation and the need to make things exactly as they were. Let’s have a new type of Christmas this year: one that focuses on what the hallmarks of the season should be: gratefulness for any time we can be together or connected with family and friends, thankfulness for the moments this difficult year has shed light on grace and persistence.

I am not discounting that many of us will not be able to celebrate in the same way to which we are accustomed and many may feel the brunt of not being able to partake in favourite traditions or, even—and most sadly—to see family and friends due to travel and lockdown restrictions. And we all know that Zoom calls are just not the same.

But Jesus came to dispel loneliness, to uplift those who are sick and discouraged and to shine a light on those who are trying to get by. In this, no matter how we change our Christmas traditions, we can find a true and constant tradition.