Longest Night

This is the first Christmas season for this blog. My eldest son’s birthday is just ten days before Christmas, and I clearly remember that first Christmas when our family became larger. The baby’s first Christmas ornaments on the tree. Our exhaustion and fatigue that carried over from moving in to our first house just five weeks before into a level of feeling barely competent to care for this little human being. The Advent and Christmas stories, the waiting for the birth of our Christopher and waiting for the birth once-again of Jesus, changed that year for us. Christmas changes when you have children, as you retell the old stories and see the season through a young person eyes.

‘More ‘ights, more ‘ights,’ was the cry of the two year old as he grieved the end of Christmas, when the light displays were switched off, the decorations put away, and the bleak mid-winter regained its hold. Not yet ready to slip back to the darkness of winter, his call of ‘‘more ‘ights, more ‘ights” continued through to the end of January.

As we have steadily moved in our orbit around the sun, and the sun apparently dips to its lowest zenith of the year, I, too, cry out for more light. November and December are tough months here. Less than one third of the daylight hours are sunny. It’s when I have to bring out the artificial sunshine to help displace the gloom. Seasonal affective disorder or SAD is what they call it. I call it the normal adaptation of mammals to the winter season when our bodies say it’s time to hibernate.

I feel good going into these darker days. Better by far than two years back when seemingly all of the audacity of hope was sucked away.

I went to a Blue Christmas service this past Sunday. Not so much for me this time, as I’m in a better place. There were the mothers and wives grieving the deaths by suicide. The sister grieving her sister’s family lost over Lockerbie thirty years ago. And perhaps more tragic than all, the young woman that lost her family this year, disowned by her family because of who she is. She’s a courageous woman that just found a new family in the church.

Finally, if you haven’t already put the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline number in your phone: (800) 273-8255 — please do so. You or someone you love may need it. And in your Christmas and New Year’s gatherings, perhaps you can share it with just one other person.