Notes from my Knapsack 12-26-24

Notes from my Knapsack 12-26-24
Jeff Gill

The days after Christmas are a journey
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Every birth is a miracle of sorts.

Christmas celebrations often lift up this everyday reality. Any birth, all births, are a miracle we do not fully understand.

We may know something about fertilization and gestation and labor and delivery, but to go from a hope, a dream, a desire, but no person, to the sudden arrival (even with nine months to anticipate, sudden) of a person who is now very emphatically here: it's a miracle.

There was a hidden, water-borne existence as the potential came to pass, there's much myth and legend let alone reality around the experience of coming into this world, for women and men (men mostly imaginatively, standing to one side), but once the birth has happened, there's now a child, audible as well as fully visible, calling on us to respond in love and care.

Every birth is a miracle, whether that of Jesus or your own child; you, too, were born, and if you'll pardon my making this point with emphasis, that means you are a miracle.

All this I try to hold onto for the joy of Christmastime. I also have to admit that the last five years, and in many ways for even longer, the season has had a close association with death. Which is, if you'll forgive the drastic comparison, a miracle of sorts, though we rarely use that word. You wait, and watch; at one moment there is breath and life, and then there is not, and something, someone, is gone.

My first funeral as a minister was one where the family met with me on Christmas Eve, their widower father having passed the day before, and we planned a service for Dec. 28th. When in our conversation I mentioned it was the "Feast of the Holy Innocents," one of the adult children said to me "I didn't know there were sad events connected to Christmas." It almost made her feel a bit better, certainly a little less alone.

Over the years, I've gotten used to the peculiarities of funerals around "the holidays." Not comfortable with them, but it's something you get used to. People die in June, and they die in late December, too; the rituals and forms and comforts of grief should work in any season, and they do. I was just at a memorial service for a family friend who passed a couple of months back, but we all came together with an Advent wreath in the front of the church, and someone had wisely brought her Christmas stocking, with a piano sewn onto it as her life's great joy.

Sorrow, smiles; grief, laughter. Christmas, and Christmas miracles, around entering this life, and leaving it.

We have memories aplenty this time of year, and oh what a miracle memory is, especially when it fades or turns traitor. You start to appreciate the wonder of a memory caught and held differently when you watch them slip away wholesale for another.

Christmas is a time of miracles: that God was born into this life in a way that tells us we are miracles in a strangely similar way, and that leaving this life leaves traces which can be forgotten, but never wholly erased. Time itself is slippery during the Christmas season, and it will take us into the new year to get our bearings for what is next to come, having just been so deeply into the past.

You are a miracle, reader. Blessings on your 2025.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not sure he's ready for a new year, but you know. Tell him your memories of 2024 at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.