I Believe in A Christmas Carol (and the Redemptive Power of Memory)

“This time of year, I struggle more.”
~Charles DickensA Christmas Carol

My daughter is crying. “It’s fat and red!” Jess says. We’re driving down the road in my sports car, with four seats on the floor. “Who is he, my love?” I ask. “for him!” She is crying. “He’s going to come to our house late at night. You’re going to have to fight him!”

Jess is four years old. You’ll often see me teaching self-defense classes to adults. She’s not afraid of having her house broken into as much as she is afraid of the idea that I might end up in jail: “Santa can’t come in!”

I stop and turn off the holiday music. “Jess, honey, Santa isn’t real,” I said, surprised that I’d spilled the beans. I stopped, tears glistening in the dome light of our car. “It only shows up on TV and stories. We all walk together because it’s beautiful.” And so she smiles. “Okay, Dad! Let’s go!”

Another single parent tragedy averted. For the year 1992 at least.

The following Christmas season, Jess turns five and is completely ready to believe in Santa again. Fears of an overweight intruder in an imposing costume are replaced by, well, Sugar peaches Dancing in her head. Jess’s mother scolds me for telling her the truth too soon. My friends are disgusted.

Except one.

Bob is about my age. He and his wife have no children. Instead, they work like Santa and his elf at a local department store. Bob isn’t skinny at all, but he has a beautiful baritone voice and a red suit that would be the envy of our local community theater.

“She was scared last year, it happened,” he says over lunch. “You did the right thing. You told some crying kids the truth, too. Then Bob has an idea. We plan on cups of steaming hot cocoa.”

This weekend, Jess and I drove to Bob’s house. He’s fully dressed as Kris Kringle when we arrive. “I’m not really Santa,” he tells my wide-eyed five-year-old. “Just an assistant.” He points to an antenna towering above the roof of his house. “Kids tell me what they want, or see, or hand me letters, and I tag them Wow There until the reindeer get to it.”

Almost, an elf opens the front door: “Who wants chocolate chips?” We sweep inside and sit in their living room near a small alcove. Bob is a ham radio fan (the real reason for this antenna). Halfway between milk and cookies, his receiver rings.

“Santa One to Santa 382, ​​come.”

“382 here,” Bob replies. I read you.” Soon Santa One tells us that Prancer has just arrived with the latest letters that Bob and his wife left for them to collect. “Mrs. “Klaus is passing them now,” he explains. Jess is in awe. Then she nearly cried — in a good way this year — when Santa 382 asked her if she wanted to talk to TRUE Santa. Bob arranged the entire show with a friend in Ohio.

But Jess’s birthday isn’t over yet.

On Christmas Eve, the sheriff’s deputy is here when Jess arrives home from school with her mother. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he intones from his squad car. “I have some news for the little one.” He explains that they are tracking Santa to the station; His sleigh is over Asia and will be in South Carolina later tonight. “Just in time for the little girls to get their presents,” he chuckled, then walked away.

Jess spends Christmas with her mother and grandmother that year. At about midnight, with my mother’s permission, I crept out and distributed corn feed on the back porch, collecting clay in the shapes of hooves—the final clue that took Santa back to a little girl’s childhood.

Jess was 26 when she died in 2015. As an adult, she told me she understood why I revealed the truth when she was four; And why she had so much trouble the following year. “I knew it was surreal,” she said. “But I believe in my father.”

These memories can make holidays without my daughter miserable. But the opposite is true. I dust each one off as if I were to receive a precious gift. Anniversaries make Christmas more valuable.

So I thank God and Christmas carol.

Travel with me now, as Scrooge followed a helpful spirit in the past, to another holiday season. It’s 1:06 PM on November 29, 1988. After forty-two hours of grueling labor, Jess’s mother gives the final push, surrounded by hospital staff. The doctor waves to me. I get dressed, gloved and masked, extend my hand to shake hands and bring my daughter into this world.

Her mother is too exhausted to support baby Jess, so after the check-ups, I hold our little girl in my arms. I didn’t realize until this moment that gratitude and praise could be the same thing. “Thank you, Lord,” she whispered, “look at her.” “Look at her, dear God, dear God.”

We own exactly one VHS tape: Christmas carol (1984) starring George C. Scott. Jess’s mother and I watch the movie over and over again, usually alone, while taking turns working late at night with our baby girl. To this day, her mother tells me she will never watch that show again. Not me.

Since Jess died, I see Christmas carol every year. It’s a little tradition that makes the holiday season easier to bear. In this way, memory is a good thing. But it can also be very bad.

Memory is sometimes a fickle, fickle, and unwelcome guest. Augustine Perhaps he was right when he lamented: “Great is the power of memory, a fearful thing, O God, of boundless depth and variety.” It is very easy to focus on our many failures. I have a litany of parental blemishes that I can remember in a heartbeat, but this is less than futile, it is harmful.

Thinking about mistakes that we cannot change offers no solutions or hope. Rather, the relationship with our dead can turn into… Loving in separationAs philosopher Thomas Attig says. We may choose a realistic and useful memory that enriches our holidays. In this, memory is our ally.

Bereaved parents can reconstruct the smallest details of their children’s lives with amazing clarity, according to Ruth Malkinson and Liora Bar-Tor of Tel Aviv University. this phenomenon arises for the rest of their lives. Two other researchers, University of New South Wales psychologists Fiona McCallum and Richard Bryant, suggest that personal reminiscing provides an opportunity Unified framework In grief that helps us understand ourselves and our connections while promoting positive coping responses.

“I tend to believe that God’s main purpose in giving us memory is to enable us to move forward Go back in time“Therefore, if we did not play these roles correctly in the first round, we can still make another attempt now,” says author and theologian Frederick Buechner. He adds that this is not a matter of self-deception, but an opportunity to remove the power of memory over us, and to come to terms with grief.

Buchner was 10 when his father ended his life in 1936. For decades, when asked how his father died, Buchner avoided what he considered the shameful truth, muttering instead something about his father. Heart problem. This in turn led to repressed emotions, anxiety and guilt. He admits that death was real enough for him to finally cry only in middle age. He finally learned this when he read Jesus He said“Do this in remembrance of me” was not suggesting a journey down the road of misery. Instead, Buchner writes, memory allows us “to call the dead past back into the world.” The living present“.

When I watch Christmas carolPast and present come together in an immediate and timeless moment. This may be the closest we have come in our time-enslaved world to understanding eternity. The bereaved father writes: “This wonderful knowledge is beyond my power, far beyond my ability to reach.” King David. “Where can I go to escape your spirit? Where can I escape your presence?” Researchers call this the expectancy aspect of mourning Uniform time. there no The relationship between the number of years that pass after death, explains Robert Weiss (University of Massachusetts), and the intensity of our memories, the intensity of our grief, or the depth of our love.

This may be one reason why grief exacts such a heavy toll. Is it worth it? Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel He believes so: “Suffering contains the secret of creation and its eternal dimension. At the end of suffering and uncertainty, God awaits us. the struggle Continuing a relationship with our dead in their physical absence is a vital part of grief, according to Barbara Thompson (Sage Colleges) and Robert Niemeyer (University of Memphis). We maintain our healthy emotional and spiritual connections through memory and ritual.

Christmas carol It’s just a ritual for me. Watching the movie provides a time and place to revisit the first holiday season with Jess. It gives meaning to eternally intertwined love, to borrow a phrase from Friedrich Rückert, who lost his two youngest children during the Christmas holidays in 1833-34:

What goes does not pass
Away: remains in essence,
If not in the senses; tangled
forever

Scrooge’s Memories Christmas carol Blending past and present into one possible future. But salvation is not out of reach. In an act of atonement and mercy, Jacob Marley appears to warn his old partner before all is lost. Suddenly we realize that only relationships It seems To end in death. To Scrooge’s great surprise, and to ours, love remains in memory and hope, a truth that Charles Dickens knew from painful experience.

On March 31, 1851, Dickens’ father, John, died at the age of sixty-five. “I stayed there until he died, oh so quiet,” he mourned. “I barely know what to do.” He wraps his mother in his arms as they cry together. Two weeks later, on April 14, the famous author was speaking at a dinner party when his nine-month-old daughter, Dora, developed a severe convulsion and died almost instantly. Regret and sadness dominated his life throughout that summer and into the holiday season.

“You will hold dear places in our hearts at Christmas, and beside the Christmas fires; in the time of eternal hope, and in the Christmas of eternal mercy, we will close our doors.” nothing!” Dickens writes in December of that year. “Accept these memories with tender encouragement! They are of time and all its comforting and peaceful reassurances; And the history that reunited the living and those on earth dead“.

I also closed nothing. Memories hurt, but I wouldn’t trade a single one of them, the good and the bad. I too am reunited with my dead through remembrance, tears and prayer. As indicated Christmas carol Once again, I think my daughter is with me, flopped on the couch, free Of tears except the good kind. I trust in the promise of Christmas. We will be together again. Santa may not be real, but Jess is.

“I will honor Christmas in my heart, and I will try to keep it all year long.
I will live in the past, present and future. The three spirits must strive within me. “I won’t discount the lessons they teach.”
~Charles Dickens, Christmas carol