Christmas music tugs on the memories of Christmas past

Music has a way of tugging memories from the back of your mind and dropping them in your lap. 

🎄“Up on the rooftop” brings me back to my first solo in our annual school Christmas concert. 

🎄“Silver bells”, and I’m in elementary music class, imagining the wonder of the city lights in all the snow (city life was something of a foreign concept to little country-me). 

🎄“Oh beautiful star of Bethlehem,” and I’m sitting on the hard church pew listening to the beautiful harmony of the young people’s Christmas program. 

🎄“Come on, ring those bells,” the sounds of Evie ringing from the cassette player in the living room, Mom’s garlands all fancy around the kitchen. 

🎄“I’ll be home with bells on,” Dolly and Kenny crooning in Home-Ec sewing class, me struggling with what I now know as signs of depression. 

🎄“I’ll be home for Christmas” the year Boney M became huge with their Christmas album, sitting in my cousin’s truck, pondering how I’d given my young heart away to heartache. 

On and on, the music draws me through memory lane; some come easy, like a hug, and others I’d rather pluck out of the memory bank and discard for good.

This is the effect that Christmas time can have on us. The music, traditions, and decorations all bring Christmas past to the forefront, and the years skip through our minds in merry succession (and some not so merry). We’re soft at Christmas, our five senses highly engaged, and our emotions vulnerable to all the memories, a reason it can also be a difficult time for many. The memories are too vivid, the hurt is too fresh, the missing too poignant. We just want to get through Christmas, bring down the tree and pack up the memories that sting like lemon to a fresh cut.

The memories are too vivid, the hurt is too fresh, the missing too poignant.

And then I wonder, can we still celebrate Christmas if we’re walking through the valley? Maybe we celebrate it differently. Perhaps it’s a low-key Christmas where the gifts, decorations and food don’t matter so much —

--where the focal point is the baby Jesus in the manger,
the One who came to earth to hold us up when we can no longer stand for the pain, 
the One who will be our strength when our strength is gone, 
the One who sees each tear, knows each regret, 
the One who knew what He would suffer to save us, and still He came, 
the God-man who left heaven for us, 
to comfort us in our dark night of the soul, 
the One who can bring hope when it seems our hope has all but dried up.

It is for this darkness that He came.
The Light of the World come to be our light,
to walk with us in our weakness.
Emmanuel –God with us. 

That’s what we can hold onto when Christmas seems impossible to bear. It's for this that the Christ of Christmas came.