Christmas Without the Kids

"I don't know what I'd do for the holidays if I didn't have kids..."

"I just can't imagine Christmas without kids.."

"I don't know how people celebrate Christmas alone. After all, Christmas is for kids..."

And that's just an example of the stuff I hear every year around this time...callous statements that seem calculated to make me question my own motives for celebrating the Christmas holiday in even the smallest ways.

I'm not sure, though, that people are thinking when they say these kinds of things. My sense is that these are pretty much gut reactions, based on the joy they've share with their children and their lack of exposure to people who don't have children. They can't imagine life without children because, when people have children, their lives are never the same.

Then again, life is never the same for anyone--with or without children. None of us lives in an hermetically sealed bell jar, so all of us are impacted by the lives of others, and all of us grow old. There's no way around the latter statment for sure.

There is no doubt that getting older without children is vastly different than getting older with children. Yet each of us that does not have children chooses a different way to live out his/her life. The most common choices, I think, are the middle-aged playboy who takes up with the trophy wife, or the spinster auntie who dotes on one or another of her nieces or nephews.

But there are other ways. The lives of single adults are never depicted in popular culture, so we rarely have an idea what those lives look like. I've known single women who spent their holidays at soup kitchens, while others bought all the Christmas trimmings for families that could not afford them. I've know single men who sung with choirs, and others who spent time hunting, hiking or ice fishing. I've known other singles who've gone off to swingers resorts--and still others who travelled to spend time with an ageing relative.

Without children (and sometimes even without partners) there's no sense of obligation to others--no "have to" do this or that. Since any meaning to the holiday is not imposed from the outside, we have to find that meaning within ourselves, and make choices as to how we will express that meaning.

Last year I put up my own Christmas tree. I'd had other trees in the past, but the ornaments were always bought with sentiment of another person and with the intention that we would be together always. Those ornaments were promises of a future that didn't come to pass. So, to buy my own tree, and my own ornaments was very empowering. I put together something that is an expression of my feelings and sentiments about the Christmas holiday--and I like to share that with others.

My tree is an expression of my heart.

I have been thinking a lot, though, about who I will share my holidays with in the future. It's become clearer to me that there probably won't be another marriage--and certainly not children. Biology, you know.

So I've been thinking more and more about how I can touch the lives of others during the holidays.

I heard an interesting report on NPR this afternoon about the difficulties of merchant seamen this time of year...and if I lived in or near a port city, I'd find the nearest Seamen's Church and get involved.

I find myself wanting to adopt sons of some kind.

We have a military base in Chicopee--Westover. It's pretty big. And while I'm not the queen of partiotic sentiment, I've been thinking about young men away from home--guys who may be missing their families. Guys who may not have homes to go home to even if they could. They're young--and are perhaps trying to learn to negotiate all those mixed adult feelings that come along when nobody's buying presents and making Christmas happen *for* you.

Maybe I can teach them not to turn cold and become bitter and cynical about the Holiday. Maybe I can teach them that the best time of the Christmas holiday isn't the presents one got as a kid, but in the still, wee hours of the morning. There are moments of deep meaning and truth in those quiet mornings--and these are moments that one cannot know until one is old enough. They are moments that come with life and experience--moments that come because we know s much more about when those moments don't exist.

These are the moments and memories that we carry in our heart of hearts and are the moments of solice in times of great pain.

These are the moments that don't happen with the boisterous company of children

These are the moments when we truly know of something other than ourselves--when we know of something other than our existence.

These are moments when we know that Christmas isn't just for kids--and that the best gifts in the world can come to us, alone, in the presence of God.