Christmas is a really difficult time for me. Every year, I have these weird flashbacks to the first holiday during divorce – wandering the mall with a two-year-old, trying to figure out how to be festive for a toddler, wrangling a giant blue spruce into the living room when all I really wanted to do was hide under the covers.
I have happy memories too, and so I try to focus on those. Here is one of them.
On our second holiday after divorce, when Angie was three, she and I had almost nothing – no Christmas ornaments and barely any money for a tree. So we bought this one at Walmart for twenty bucks, and then we decorated it with ornaments my grandmother had gathered from yard sales and church bazaars. All of them were handmade by people I’d never even met. Crocheted angels, popsicle-stick sleighs, and candy canes made with colored beads and pipe cleaners.
It wasn’t much, but it was everything. I wish those church ladies could know what a difference they made for us that year.
No matter what happens, no matter who or where or why, there is always love.
