When Christmas Isn't Perfect

by Roseann McGrath Brooks

This year, I began celebrating Christmas earlier than usual. Most Decembers, I’m a strict adherent to the unwritten rule of no decorations, no carols, and even no gift shopping before Thanksgiving. However, 2024 has been a year of change for me—as an American, an employee, a homeowner, and a writer. Not all of these changes have been bad, but by early November, I needed the, let’s say, “stability,” that Christmas carols and Hallmark movies bring.

While engaging in this preholiday celebrating, I recognized three things: Every year, I am on a quest for the perfect Christmas. Every year, Christmas is not what I expected. And every year, when I look back on December 25, I realize that it was, indeed, perfect.

I started brainstorming about what I thought at the time were not-so-perfect Christmases:

• The year I asked for the game Mousetrap and Mom said Santa would be dropping it off after Christmas, when the elves could make it even better (read: when the stores were restocking): I got an extra gift in January.

  
  

• The year I suspected that Dad and Mom were Santa and so told Santa at the mall that I wanted a bike with a banana seat but told my folks I wanted an English racer: I ended up with the best bike ever. (You can figure out which.)

  
  

• The first year my family cut down its own tree: It was freezing, and my mother refused to leave the car. She pointed to the first tree she saw. My father, an engineer, insisted it was too big, but she wanted it. Once the tree was in our house, my dad had to chop off one third of the bottom and one third of the top so it could fit in our living room. Instead of being a pyramid shape, it was cylindrical. It looked as if the tree started in the basement and continued into my brothers’ bedroom on the second floor. We still laugh about that.

  
  

• The year our lower-income church in Philadelphia had no heat on Christmas Eve: For the services, church members huddled together in a Sunday school room and generated our own holiday heat. It was holy and magical.

  
  

• The year our church in the suburbs was under reconstruction after a fire: We celebrated Christmas Eve at a local Marriot hotel in a giant conference room with hotel decorations and hotel snacks.

  
  

• And one of my favorites—my second Christmas as a married woman, when my husband contacted a local tree farmer who had advertised that he would donate large Christmas trees to churches who needed them but couldn’t afford them, as well as give a free tree to the minister: Hubby and I could afford our own tree, but that farmer was so proud of his offering that we had to take his free tree. It was a jack pine, pretty much the barest, scrawniest, sharpest-needled tree you can imagine (see photo). We called it our Charlie Brown Christmas tree. C’mon, who doesn’t tear up when Linus wraps his blanket around that tree and the sandlot team decorates it? (See Darlene DeLuca’s Window Over the Sink tree as well.)

Jack Pine

So, whether my husband asked Spotify to play carols from the Jackson 5 Christmas album shortly after Election Day, or we’re both sneaking an early viewing of A Christmas Movie Christmas before Thanksgiving, this is not going to be a perfect Christmas.

Which may make it the best Christmas ever.

Thanks to Liz and Liz’s readers for letting me contemplate Christmas.

Roseann McGrath Brooks loves reading and writing about romance. A New Heart, the fourth book in her Vacation Friends Romance series, is coming at the end of this year, an inspirational romance to follow Midnight Clear at Christmas. She is a freelance editor and part-time college writing tutor who recently moved to a really cool town in suburban Philadelphia, right across from a place that makes warm chocolate chip cookies every day.

In addition to two children, three grandchildren, and most of her extended family, she loves theater, bell choir, biking, running, skiing, and the Eagles. And she really enjoys grammar; get fun grammar tips from her blog on her Web site.