Grant Us the Grace

After I told my mother I didn’t like the dress she made me for Christmas because it was corduroy, not velveteen, she turned and left the room without speaking. Years later, she told me she didn’t respond angrily because she knew a reprimand would allow me to resent her rather than thinking about my own rude and hurtful words.

Dad’s union was on strike, and money was tight, something I usually understood and accepted; but my teenaged self was focused on envy of the fashionable red-velveteen dress Santa had delivered to my best friend.

I saw my mother’s disappointment and hurt before she turned away, but mired in envious misery, I didn’t try to make things right. Later, after sulking in my room, I came to my senses, found her folding laundry, and choked out, “I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” she said. “I’m not sorry that I can’t give you everything you want, because that isn’t how life works, but I am sorry that you can’t see all you have.”

I thought of Mom’s statement a few weeks ago when a television commentator said that rather than pushing Thanksgiving aside in our rush to get started on Christmas, we should savor the simplicity of the November holiday and call on its spirit of gratitude throughout the coming season.

So this year, during the busy buildup to December 25th, I’m going to notice simple pleasures, open myself to them, and remember all I have.

I invite you to join me.

We’ll enjoy the red-cheeked exuberance of small children as they happy-dance in store aisles and gaze in round-eyed wonder at Christmas trees filled with light. We’ll smile at how angelic our young ones look as they perform in holiday concerts, how happy they seem as they race home from school with decorations and cards they created; how thoughtfully they debate the number of cookies to leave for Santa.

We’ll sing carols with messages and melodies that have resonated through the ages, concentrating until their hopeful words envelop us and carry us back to the time when we sang “Silent Night” with all the belief and love of our young hearts.

We’ll read traditional Christmas stories to ourselves and others and respond to the lines we well know: Santa’s exclamation as he drove out of sight, “Merry Christmas to all and to all a goodnight,” Tiny Tim’s “God bless us, everyone!” and the simple but compelling words of the Bible, “And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.”

If Christmas Eve brings us a calm night when the trees are wrapped in frosty lace, the snow sparkles with frozen crystals, and every star in the heavens is visible, we’ll take the time to bundle up and walk outdoors to search for the Star of the East and listen as the glory of the night whispers our blessings.

My wish is that all of us will be granted the grace to enjoy the Christmas we have —not the ones others are having or the one we wanted to have — the grace to find beauty in the simple, the grace of understanding that the best days are filled with small wonders.