Trappings: the outward features, roles or objects associated with a particular situation, role, or thing . . . The symbols . . . (Wikapedia)
I love all the trappings of Christmas, from Rudolph to the Salvation Army’s bells and kettle. The tinkling sounds, the spicy aromas, the sugary tastes, the sparkle and the lights in the darkness, the sacred and the secular . . .
And this year is no different. Except now the beauty is viewed through a film of tears, as in the Christmas tree pictured above. Tears for the world. For myself. For us all. For all the loss and pain and fear and uncertainty.
And it is my hope that we are each honoring those personal losses as well, with some kind of acknowledgment of grief, whatever form that may take for you right now. This extraordinary time in which we find ourselves has created loss, or at least delays, of so many different varieties, from the excruciatingly painful loss of a loved one or our own personal health and well-being to the loss of income, routine, ways of being and relating to each other . . .
The hardest lesson that I ever learned is that grief will eventually lead to new life if we can stay with it until we have moved through it and beyond it.
And maybe that’s what the Christmas story is really all about. Rudolph and the Salvation Army and Santa weren’t there on that hard night two thousand years ago. It was raw pain and fear and darkness . . . And grief. A story about a young girl giving birth pretty much alone, in dirty, primitive surroundings, supposedly aware that the son to whom she was giving birth would be subjected to a devastating death in the end. Not a pretty story, no matter how much we’ve cleaned it up, and surrounded it with trappings.
As in all good stories, there was redemption and new life in the end. But it. was only made possible because the characters in the story lived the hard part fully.
Stay with where you are now.