It Is Love Made Visible

I’ve always loved Christmas — or perhaps more accurately, I’ve always felt it deeply.

Which is strange, because I don’t remember most of them.
Only how they felt.

Not as pictures I can replay, not as scenes I can step back into —
but as something lived in my body.

The texture of the season.
The way it seemed to hold me.

Only much later did I understand how much of who I was becoming
was already being shaped there.

Before

Before everything broke, Christmas had been full — busy, fragrant, overflowing.

The house was alive with preparation and people.
The kitchen hummed.
The shops were full.

There was stress, yes — but it was a happy stress.
The kind that comes from being part of something larger than yourself.

My mother gave every ounce of herself to making Christmas special.

She loved that everyone came home.
She missed her children fiercely while they were away at boarding school —
a sacrifice she bore quietly, because she believed it would serve their future.

Christmas was the one time the house was whole again.

I don’t know how much of that I truly remember, and how much I imagine now because of what came later.

Memory does that.
It fills in gaps when something breaks the line.

Same tree, new life

The Christmas I will never forget came two months after my father died —
suddenly, unexpectedly.

We had the same tree.
In the same house.
We ate the same food at the same table.

Life carried on around us.
And we did our best to carry on with it.

In the shop window that year there had been an enormous teddy bear —
far too big, far too expensive, far too unlikely to ever be mine.

I remember my mother handing it to me quietly,
telling me my father had wanted me to have it.

Normally, the excitement would have been uncontainable.

Instead, I held that bear tightly and still felt empty.
Dark.

As though something essential had been scooped out from the centre of me.

The gestures were familiar.
The meaning underneath them had shifted forever.

A teddy bear is a poor replacement for a father.

But as something to hold, to speak to, to cry into —
as a way of knowing you were seen, remembered, and loved —
it was priceless.

Your father wanted you to have this.

She inclined her head — just enough.

Forever is a long time

The others finished their studies and moved on with their lives, as best they could.

My mother and I stayed behind.

Christmas wasn’t something we looked forward to anymore —
but the tree went up every year.

The day arrived.
The food got cooked.

Life carried on.
And so did we — while the ache stayed,
deepening quietly as forever stretched on.

Blueprints — and their costs

When I eventually had my own home, Christmas became mine to hold.

Mine to shape.
Mine to make meaningful for others.

By then, I had learned some things — and mislearned others.

I had begun to make sense of responsibility, of rest, of grief.

Some of what I learned was wisdom.
Some of it was survival dressed up as principle.

I learned to cope.
To function.

To treat grief as something private.
To believe that if I chose to cry, it should be done quietly,
while the world carried on laughing.

I learned to look at how much worse things could be, how fortunate I still was —
and to decide that celebration was not optional.

That if I was alive, I had an obligation to honour life.
To create a home that felt good for the people inside it.

There is a kind of strength in that.
There is also a cost.

Because if the only skill you learn is carry on,
you begin to confuse endurance with a good life.

A practice, lived

Still — I loved creating Christmas.

I created it with care and attention.
Money does make beauty easier, and I won’t pretend otherwise.

There were years of abundance.

Themes for the tree —
beach, fairy, white lights and crystals, organic and earthy.

It was indulgent.
It was joyful.
It carried a sense of romance and celebration.

And underneath the themes, something mattered more.

A practice.

Later, when we owned a shop, Christmas became a blur of customers and long days.

But when our daughter was born, one decision came easily:

Christmas Day would be protected.
The shop would close.

It would be the one day of the year
we belonged only to each other.

From the outside, the day looked like Christmas.

But what mattered was not how it looked.
It was how it was lived.

Love, without certainty

Over time, I came to understand that Christmas wasn’t something to get right.

It was something to practice.

Not the performance of cheer,
or the denial of grief.

Across cultures and histories, this time of year sits at a threshold.

Some hold it as sacred.
Some as seasonal.
Some not at all.

But many of us feel something in it —
a turning, a pause, a reckoning.

A moment that asks:
What did this year take?
What did it give?
What needs to be carried forward —
and what needs to be put down?

For me, the answer has never been about certainty.

It has been about the ways we keep finding to practice love —
through gratitude, care,
and a felt sense of belonging to something larger than ourselves.

Love made visible

And that, for me, is what Christmas has always been about.

If this time of year feels complicated for you,
you’re not doing it wrong.

You’re simply standing at a threshold.

And thresholds, by their nature, ask us not to rush —
but to notice who we are becoming as we cross.

A small invitation for this week

As this season approaches, notice what you are carrying into it.

Not what you think you should feel —
but what is actually there.

Notice where love shows up quietly in your days:
in care, in memory, in presence, in the way you choose to keep going.

You don’t need to make this season perfect.
You don’t need to get it right.

Just notice how you are standing at the threshold —
and who you are becoming as you cross it.