(Although I'm posting this later, I wrote it in the wee hours of Christmas morning.)
It's past midnight here, and I'd call it partly cloudy.
I went to midnight Mass, though. Always a good thing to do, especially when y0u are feeling somewhat ... uncertain ... about Christmas.
It is strange the odd assortment of Christmas memories I have. I remember the magic of seeing a bunch of packages and some new bikes piled around the tree. I remember most fondly that special wonder of seeing that in the middle of the night, when the world was dark except for the lights on the tree. I remember, later, when I was too old to believe in Santa but my little brothers were starting to question the whole thing, my mom started a tradition of all of us kids sleeping together, and it was the job of us older ones to get the little ones to go to sleep without trying to catch Santa in the act. I remember listening to the radio those nights. We would always find some station that was tracking Santa's progress and playing Christmas carols, and we'd listen until we fell asleep.
Later on, there was all the joy of being home from college at Christmas, and the crazy year that I spent the two weeks before Christmas on a trip to Israel, which was wonderful. But I spent half of Christmas Eve on an airplane from Israel, half in O'Hare airport trying to get a flight to Texas, and my bonus 6 hours on a bus to South Bend, where I was living at the time. Somehow, they had an easier time getting me out of South Bend than O'Hare. I remember the eerie silence of the Notre Dame campus, devoid of all signs of life that still, silent night. I remember how much I appreciated the Christmas humor of the pilot the next morning. I also remember it as one of the strangest Christmases ever, not simply because of my travel, but because my mom had been sick. Between that and not being quite sure when I would get there, they decided we would go out to eat, but it turned out nothing was open. We finally found a Denny's that was open, but it turned out that they were out of food. We eventually found an IHOP that had about half of their menu available. Strange Christmas.
This year is my eighth without my mom and my fifth without my dad. Usually, since my mom died, I spend Christmas with my brother Joey and his wife and daughters. Christmas Eve is the big-deal part, at my sister-in-law's parents' house, with all of her cousins and folks, and they always make me feel included.
I generally sneak out early, for midnight Mass, which the parish there oddly schedules for 9pm. My dad and I used to go together. I decided this morning that I was going to midnight Mass. And I did. And in the quiet, just before it started, I suddenly remembered something very strange. I remember sitting with my dad at that early midnight Mass the year before he died. We had to get there early to get a seat, and as we sat there, he started to nod off. And he just looked so old to me, and I wondered how many Christmases we had left. Strange that I wondered that on what turned out to be his last Christmas. Strange that I remembered it tonight.
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