A Sad — and yet joyful — Christmas

Story by Joe Pisani

Even though we say “’tis the season to be jolly,” “joy to the world” and all that other stuff, I approach the Christmas season with a measure of anxiety because I’m convinced I’ll be visited with some calamity or family tragedy. A lot can happen between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.

For much of my adult life, I’ve been apprehensive that something unsettling will happen…and it usually did. Let me start with the small stuff.

There was the Christmas Eve my mother fell down the stairs carrying an armful of presents from the attic, and we spent the night in the emergency room.

There was the year my wife was nine months’ pregnant with our first daughter and fell while crossing a stream at the Christmas tree farm because I insisted we had to cut our own tree. She spent the holiday in bed.

There was the year I had to throw our half-decorated tree out into the snow, stinking of Raid, because my daughters discovered a spiders’ nest in the branches, and hysteria erupted. Pretty soon spiders — not to mention my four daughters and wife — were running for cover.

Then, there was the year the doctors told us my mother’s cancer had spread, and it would be her last Christmas. That was one of the saddest holidays ever. (Spoiler alert: She lived for ten more Christmases.)

Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of Christmas joy, great presents and wonderful food, and the wondrous awe of Midnight Mass. But there was loss. One year, I spent the season alone in St. Petersburg, where we lived, because my wife and two young daughters returned home when her adoptive father died two days before Christmas. A year later her grandmother died on the same day.

Then, there was the Christmas Eve I got a call from my sister and learned my father had died while we were 300 miles away, stranded in a snowstorm. It’s crazy to be angry with God on Christmas, but I was.

My sister spent the night by herself in an empty emergency room. At midnight, a young minister saw her and stopped. He asked if she was OK, and she told him what happened. His first words, which I remember years later, were “What a wonderful gift to spend Christmas in Heaven.” At the time, I had my doubts.

Whenever I tell people that story, they have their own versions. Someone they loved died during the holiday season. 

For those who mourn, it hardly seems like a gift, but when you think about it, just imagine the majestic joy of celebrating Christmas in Heaven with the Baby Jesus, the Blessed Mother, St. Joseph, the choirs of angels, the saints and everyone else.

However, for the families and friends left behind, the loss of a loved one can be a particularly intense sorrow over the holiday. The grief never entirely goes away, and you relive it every year.

Nevertheless, as a priest friend once told me: Christmas is always a source of joy and hope, even amid adversity.

The Christmas story, itself, is a story of trials. A young couple travels more than 70 miles to an unfamiliar village, arriving as she is about to delivery her baby. Human kindness is in short supply, and there’s no room at the inn, so they seek shelter in a cave with the animals, where she delivers her son and lays him in a manger. And yet there was joy and hope and peace on that cold and lonely night.

The tinsel-covered “holiday season” can never give us joy and hope and the peace. All it can offer are fleeting pleasures.

In a Christmas greeting written 500 years ago, a 16th century friar, Fra Giovanni Giocondo, understood all of this. He said:

“There is nothing I can give you which you have not; but there is much, very much that, while I cannot give it, you can take. No Heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take Heaven! No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace!

The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. Take joy. There is radiance and glory in the darkness, could we but see. And to see it, we have only to look. …And so at this Christmastime, I greet you with the prayer that for you — now and forever — the day may break and the shadows flee.”

May the shadows flee for us all. Wishing you a joyful, peaceful and hopeful and  Christmas.