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It’s a strange thing. Joy to the World is playing in stores. Happy little lights are wrapped around houses and trees. Silly inflated reindeer bop in the winter wind and yet. Yet, Christmas feels so… heavy for so many of us.  

The Christmas melancholies hit me hard this year. Early, even. We are 300+ miles away from Iowa, where both my husband and I grew up. We rarely go back for Christmas anymore. We always miss our families terribly, but secretly, we’re a little smug about the fact that, on Christmas Day we can be found on long hikes with the kids, crunching branches through the woods in 65 degree weather, all the while, knowing that back home, a bitter wind is seeping through their window panes. Yet even in our smugness, there’s still that little voice, wrestling its way out from under piles of gifts and our cozy, quiet Christmases that chastises us “You should be home with your family right now.”

 Well, I’ve come to expect that Christmas Day voice. 

But this year, it came early and had a lot more to say. 

A stomach bug hit our house and I was the first one down, four days before Christmas. This wicked little virus forced me to stop my ragged rushing and responsibility mongering. To be still. For the record, I hate being still. But there I was, still. Alone with my thoughts. 

I’ve never been afraid of my thoughts. I’m an enneagram four for Pete’s sake. But I wasn’t prepared for the onslaught of them, with all this down time I suddenly had. And as I lay in bed tonight trying to sleep, my stomach still gurgling, it hit me – the reason why I feel sad. The reason why, I think maybe we feel sad at Christmas.

I think it’s precisely because of the stopping. The downtime. Because, as it turns out, those pesky feelings we never give air time to, they never actually go away, they just hide in the shadows like little gremlins waiting for a sleepless night or vacation or an empty house to snuggle up to us.

There’s all the frenetic activity that’s work and kids and spring breaks and taxes and summer camps…then September comes and the snowball really starts gaining speed, getting bigger and heavier, and Halloween and Thanksgiving hit, then Christmas parties and the race to figure out how to buy all the presents for all the people… And then it stops. 

Christmas comes. 

…all is calm, all is bright.

And the kids are off school and you’re off work, (even if for just a day or two) and it’s like the table that is your life, the table that’s been systematically stacked to the ceiling with newspapers and coffee cups and unfinished books about time management gets wiped clean for a few days.

And the surface of you is suddenly, nakedly exposed, if only to yourself.

And suddenly you see, no, you feel all the things you’ve been negotiating away – you realize how far away you’ve become from the people you love the very, very most. You remember, like in a dream, the things that used to light you up inside that you haven’t touched in ages. You look behind you and see time, the time that is your life, unraveling like a ribbon.

And it’s uncomfortable and depressing. And we long to escape these melancholy feelings so, as much as we longed for some time off, we start wanting to go back to all the distractions and busy-ness and hiding behind polite smiles and grocery lists just to stop the feelings. Because these feelings are for the birds. Thinking about them just makes us want to cry.

But maybe we should cry.  Maybe Christmas would be a good time to just stop and wrap our arms around each other and cry for all the crappy stuff in this world that makes us feel sad and out of control.

Maybe all of that is supposed to be part of Christmas. It is about new birth after all. The birth of a Savior that changes everything. Christmas is the introduction of hope into the world – a hope that says ‘you don’t have to do this on your own anymore’… ‘you don’t have to be perfect anymore’… ‘let me help’.  This is what Jesus came to say to us. So, maybe it’s time to lay it all down, let it all out, and accept the outstretched hand.

And then, after a good hard cry, we’ll look out our windows and see the Christmas lights in a new way – like little plastic beacons of hope. And we’ll find that somehow, despite the wreckage of our failures and sins and losses, joy to the world is still out there, and has been all along, just waiting for us to stop and notice.