Christmas comes again this year

Can it be that Christmas is less than a week away? It has come quietly this year, without so much of the hurrying, the planning, the buying, the addressing of cards, the baking, the worrying, the wondering if we've done all that we should be doing.

Like other things, Christmas grows quieter, more nostalgic, more home-centered as we grow older. My wife and I have done the Christmas thing (or things) for more than 45 years. We've transitioned from the two of us to the five of us to the addition of grandchildren, around whom Christmas has been focused the past dozen years.

Christmases have come in three distinct phases: (1) Childhood Christmas, when excitement over new toys, bountiful candy and an air of cheerfulness permeated our reality; (2) Christmas with children, when our joy in seeing the happiness on our children's faces exceeded all of the excitement we had known as children; and (3) Christmas with grandchildren, when we see ourselves in our grown children's faces as they experience the sheer joy of making their own children ecstatically happy.

Now, we seem to be facing another phase, when we face Christmas as aging grandparents with grandchildren grown too big for excitement and too independent to cuddle with old folks. At our age, the excitement and joy of Christmas have been tempered by the sadness of losing relatives and friends who had been integral to our Christmas happiness. We have lost parents, siblings, cousins and dear friends, whose memory haunts our Christmas revelry. We even count the years in actuarial tables to see how many Christmases we might reasonably expect to have remaining.

This Christmas will be a quieter holiday at our house. We decided not to revive our once-annual tradition of a Christmas open house. Although we are retired and should have been able to plan the party, send the invitations and do the preparations needed to get dozens of people into our home with cheerful greetings of "Merry Christmas," but we couldn't seem to get it done, and now it's too late.

Still, we intend to make Christmas a festive time, as well as a sacred time. We will attend Christmas Eve services, and we will eat a special meal, even if it is only for the two of us. We will celebrate another Christmas, and it will be one, like all the preceding ones, like no other.

Merry Christmas.