“Someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow…”
That line has always gutted me. It comes from the saddest Christmas song ever written. Sung by someone who already knew how the story bends. A person hoping, not promising that next year all our troubles will be out of sight. Until then, we muddle through somehow.
I don’t muddle and you Chalkheads know what I think about hope.
I don’t have time to muddle. There is no muddle dive or muddle sweep in my playbook. No safe little screen pass called just to survive the down. Muddle is for people waiting on relief instead of choosing action.
That song matters because it admits something people don’t like to say out loud: not everyone is having a happy Christmas. Some folks are carrying loneliness. Others are hauling addictions, finances, sickness, regret. Sometimes all of it at once. Christmas doesn’t cure that, it just shines a brighter light on it.
Christmas morning, I thought about feeling sorry for myself. That was a muddle option, a fake toss to a trap that was never going to get called in the huddle. So instead, I gathered up my sons, and we drove over to my mother-in-law’s house.
Ahead of us were my ex-wife and my daughter. One who hates me dearly. The other who thinks Dad is obnoxious and embarrassing. I didn’t have high hopes for Christmas Day.
Then something unexpected happened.
My daughter curled up next to me by the fire pit and she told me she loves me. Her mom and I got along. We finished each other’s sentences. We worked side by side in the kitchen. We laughed; we even smiled. I saw flashes of how it once was, Christmas past sneaking into Christmas present. I hope Hazel saw it too.
I did muddle a little later, smoking a cigar without PopPop, not getting a Christmas call from my Oldman or my Ma. I realized Christmas present is already sliding into Christmas past.
There will never be another Christmas with kids who are 19, 16, and 12. This might be the last one with Molly, our 13-year-old black lab, begging for scraps through the glass dining room table. There may not be many Christmases left in that house. A place I’ve gone to for twenty-five years, far too big now for a widow to sit alone in once the noise leaves.
When we packed up and drove away, I worried she might start muddling in the quiet. I thought somewhere down the road, there is a Christmas where I will be the one left alone. Left to remember an overcast day, a fire pit, my seventh-grade daughter, her mom, her grandma, all of us in sweaters on a mild Christmas Day. All of us getting along and enjoying that day. A day when fate did bring us all together.
As I get older, I start believing the day we will all be together is in heaven. Half the people who loved me are already there.
Until then, my job is simple: making Christmas a happy tradition for the Shepkids. Making sure they never learn to muddle and when they do, remember so many more are worse off.
Today is Saint Stephen’s Day or Boxing Day to some. A day to clean up, wind down, and gather again. Maybe in a pub, a church basement or a quiet kitchen table. Christmas present becoming Christmas past, with Christmas future less than a year away.
It may be cloudy today. Just remember, the sun is smiling somewhere, and your shadow is getting longer. Take a moment to admire the Christmas glow and the astonishment before it all gets wrapped up for next Christmas....
.... If the fates allow
