I’m starting to get a Christmas tingle. Normally, by this time of the season I’m worn out and ready for it to end. Now, I feel like it’s just getting started. I’m glad I held off on the decorations, both inside and out. Christmas day this year may actually be more like a religious holiday than a commercial festival. Childhood memories have reared their heads, particularly ones of visits to my mother’s relatives in Ohio, where everything pointed to midnight mass, and Christmas day and presents was a nice after thought.

It helps that the weather is chill and the air clear. I missed the Christmas star last night or the conjunction of the planets, whatever your predilection. I was picking up groceries for the drive-by, socially distanced Christmas visit of my daughter and her family, then I had an online counseling session. Those are more rewarding than I imagined. Seeing other people grieving gives your grief a continuum, and there is a lot of power in knowing you’re hardly alone in your predicament.

What’s most surprising to me, is how much I’ve started thinking about my mother, who died in 1968. I realize now I barely grieved at all. I was 21, in Charleston, got the call, went home, cried, buried her, and went back to Charleston. No one at the Naval Hospital, a world of doctors, ever asked me how I was doing. Not once. Maybe at that day and time, you just manned up, and got back to work. After all kids were dying in Vietnam and that was a bit more pressing. Hard to know. Anyway, I have a new appreciation of what my father went through, who had three boys at home still to raise. I think the apropos phrase would be, better late than never. Merry Christmas.