What happens when you are asked to recall Christmases of past and can’t find too many happy ones? That’s what happened when my youngest daughter asked me to tell a story of when I was a little girl. Of course, I came up with the one stellar story I do recall because it stands in stark contract to the others; a story that pleased since it was about the arrival of a puppy. 
Other grown ups were around and later over a cup of tea we remarked on the tragedies or sorrows of the past that colored our various childhoods – tough stuff like farm accidents, a drunk parent, divorce, kidnapping, near deaths – and sat in wonder at our emotional survival of it all. It seemed to me grist for the mill that the happy times are always juxtaposed to the sad ones. And it is that which gives life color. Yet my children, as far as I can tell, have had happy, seemingly uneventful childhoods thus far I wonder if they’d ever be prepared for hardship. We all need stress to toughen us up a bit. My past formed me into a highly independent, I’ll–make–my–way-one-way–or–another attitude.
Yet every day this week the newspaper had some horrible story in it, siblings who died in a house fire from a portable heater, a boy side swiped to a premature death by a young man driving while text messaging on a cell phone, the assassination of Bhutto. No Tsunamis this year, but my God, my girls are cruising through life giggling and it makes me wonder when something horrible will happen.
Many years ago, after the birth of my first child, a therapy patient – a mother of two boys – said rather violently: “Why is it that once you become a mother nightmares abound – and of the most horrible images one can imagine?! Blood, limbs, screams.” She was right. And her boys are cruising through life, too, and are young men now.
I suppose given that it is the end of one year and the dawn of another it is indeed a good time to be grateful for the joys and privileges of the times in this small corner of the world. It is after all, part of my remaking, and Christmases are indeed happy.
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