An Honest Take on Christmas

Christmas isn’t always the glittery version we are promised.

Sometimes it arrives carrying a quiet ache instead of bells. Sometimes it presses on the old bruises ... tricky family dynamics that didn’t alter with time, chairs that are empty now, conversations that never quite became what we hoped they would. There’s a particular kind of sadness that shows up at Christmas, isn’t there? Not loud grief, just a low hum of loss, confusion, disappointment. The sense that something should feel whole and … doesn’t.

I think we don’t talk enough about that Christmas. The one where you show up anyway. Where you smile, but part of you is still sorting through old wounds and yearnings. Where love exists, but it’s complicated. Where joy and grief share the same room and neither one fully leaves.

And yet ... somehow ... there is still joy. Not the sparkly kind. The quieter, more stubborn joy. The kind that sneaks in through candlelight, or a familiar carol that catches you off guard, or a tender reading of the Christmas story. Joy that doesn’t deny the pain, but sits beside it and says, I’m here too.

Christmas has a way of holding contradiction. It always has. A holy birth in a borrowed space. Hope arriving not in triumph, but in vulnerability. Light entering a world that was, and still is, very broken.

So if your Christmas feels mixed ... if your heart is full and heavy at the same time ... you’re not doing it wrong. You’re paying attention. You’re telling the truth. This season isn’t only for the carefree and the whole; it’s also for the weary, the disappointed, the quietly longing.

Maybe this Christmas isn’t about fixing everything. Maybe it’s about making room. Room for tenderness. Room for grief. Room for grace to land where it needs to. And room, too, for that small, persistent joy that keeps showing up, even when we didn’t invite it.

That feels honest to me. And honestly, it feels like Christmas.