Treasures from Mom, Christmas 2025

I skipped Christmas this year.  

I did not go to the New Camaldoli Hermitage at Big Sur, as I have been doing for the past twenty years.  I did not put up a tree.  I did not have Christmas dinner with my sons.  We did not gather in the glow of sparkling lights and take turns exchanging gifts.   

No, my focus was on helping my grieving father and supporting my son who was discharged from the hospital early in the week. With mom’s death so fresh and my son’s health so fragile, I accepted that there would be no Christmas this year - not in the way I like to observe.

Even so, on Christmas Eve I found a quiet hour to go for a walk around the neighborhood.  I moved slowly, taking in the rising crescent moon and the thin line of red on the horizon that turned even suburbia into a peaceful winter scene.  Far from my Big Sur hermitage, I was grateful, for a moment, to sense the silent beauty of the Christmas mystery, even as I-95 buzzed in the distance.

Afterwards, I decided to set a festive Christmas table for the small group of us who had been left behind when others went on vacation. I opened the door to mom’s china cabinet and noted the shelves were covered in dust.  Mom rarely used her china, even though she took care with the dishes and saved the broken pieces for a future fix. 

I found a set of plates and placed them and her crystal water glasses on the table.  Then I moved to the drawers below, looking for festive linens.  The only ones I found were stained; they would have to do.  Opening the silverware drawer, I discovered a surprise, a single red cloth covered journal. Inside the front cover were a few mismatched post-its and sheets of paper penned with my mother’s meticulous handwriting.  A poem about Christmas. An ode to her first born child. A meditation on Autumn and what to do when life does not go your way.  Treasures, gifts from my mom.

Mom’s poems are windows into her inner life, the part of her she generally kept to herself. Each one is simple; Mom was not a published poet or a theologian. When I asked spiritual questions, she did not offer sophisticated responses. Her way was about love, everyone who knew her knows that.

Strikingly absent from her musings were any complaints.  Mom’s life was imperfect; she experienced trauma as a child and at times struggled with depression. When we were children, mom was often overwhelmed and lonely.  To cope, no doubt, she developed unusual compulsions, like filling drawers with rubber bands and ordinary stamps.  She had a very hard time throwing anything out, even junk mail.  She never fixed the broken pieces of her china set.

Reading her beautiful poems, I wondered what she would have been like if her father had been healthy or if her mother had stayed home when my mom was a child.  What would she have been like if my father had a less demanding career or if she had known how to access the kind of support my generation does?  What if the broken pieces had been glued back in place?

They never were. But underneath mom left a treasure, the purity of her heart.  The foundation of my life.

After setting mom’s table with china, stained linens, and pieces of silver that don’t match, family members gathered, graced by the presence of mom’s first great granddaughter, Clare, born last Easter. Instead of a prayer, we read mom’s poem about a Christmas where the only gift was love.