I write this on December 20, 2004, which would have been our daughter Jenny's 32nd birthday. And I well recall the events of December 20, 1972.
We had gone to the hospital for what we had expected to be a routine delivery. But complications, punctuated by Jenny's grand mal seizures, dispatched any semblance of normality.
I brought Mary home on Christmas Day without Jenny, who remained hospitalized for ten days. And despite the lovely, bright nursery we had prepared for our firstborn, a pall of anxiety darkened our holiday.
1973 did not start well.
Jenny's discharge on January 5 forced us to begin adjusting to the multiplicity of effects of extensive brain damage. On January 8, my birthday, a simple trip to the drug store to retrieve a new seizure medication found me cast into a ditch by icy roads. Mary spent the morning helplessly watching Jenny contort with grand mal seizures on the hour.
Thereafter, however, Christmases with Jenny became occasions of special wonder. Though blind and profoundly retarded, she could nonetheless discern light and shadow. We would gently lay her under the Christmas tree where, beneath the canopy of light, colorful twinklings and gentle tinklings filled her with delight.
Her brother's birth quickly altered our approach to Christmas lights. Unlike his sister, Barrett was soon able to grab and inspect–and that sometimes meant trouble. A faint glow from his tiny cheeks once compelled Mom, with trepidation and no small measure of haste, to gingerly extract a fistful of lighted bulbs from his mouth.
Christmas photographs became a tradition in 1980, the year of Barrett's birth, as we laid our two babies side by side among the gifts beneath the tree. And as Barrett gradually outstripped Jenny physically and mentally, he took it upon himself to attempt to hold up her head, to support her body and to entice her to laugh for the annual snapshot ritual.
With Jenny's tenuous health, Mary felt an urgency each year to get the Christmas pictures scheduled. 1995 was no exception. "We've got to get those pictures," she whispered to Jenny the night she saw her for the last time, not knowing the picture that year would be of Barrett kneeling beside a small unlighted Christmas tree on her grave. Darkness visited Christmas once again.
This year we have five trees festooned with hundreds of tiny bulbs. But one tree is adorned with special ornamentation: the lace and flowers of a bride. Light enshrouded the first celebration of Christ's birth as the glory of the Lord shown round the shepherds tending their flocks by night. And the same lowly Babe in the manger of two millennia past will one day return in glorious splendor to receive His bride, the church.
It's no wonder that the Bible describes Jesus in terms of light: "There was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man."
Even with no babies in our home now, the lights of Christmas still endure. And I always enjoy positing myself in the living room to reflectively gaze into their glow–and into Christmases past when the Light dispelled our darkness.
Copyright 2004 James McAlister
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