This reflection explores Christmas and grief through memory, loss, fatherhood, and resilience.
For some, it brings nostalgia and ease. For others, it carries memory, weight, and quiet reckoning. I didn’t understand that as a child, but looking back now, I see that each Christmas marked something I was learning to hold.
The First Ones
One of the earliest Christmases I remember was in Salmon Arm, British Columbia. I would have been six or seven. My brother was younger, my sister three years younger than me. We lived on the side of a mountain. When you opened the back door, the yard didn’t end. It became forest.
That wasn’t unusual where we lived. Wildlife passed through. A dump sat down the road. A creek cut its way nearby, and in warmer months it belonged to us. We built things there. Destroyed them. Imagined lives bigger than the one we were living.
That Christmas, my brother and I were given small pocket knives.
They weren’t much by most standards. Simple. Practical. Neighbourhood kids received BB guns that year, louder gifts with more obvious promise. But we were thrilled. Those knives felt like trust.
When spring came, we put them to use. Carving sticks. Cutting notches. Testing what our hands could do; learning quietly what responsibility felt like.
My mother wasn’t working then. My father was, but he wasn’t home half the time. And when he was, he wasn’t really there. Still, joy existed…modest, unannounced, but real.
Learning What Lifts Us
A few years later, we were living in a housing project in Vancouver, a place called Little Mountain. I was about nine. That Christmas, my brother received a BB gun.
What stays with me isn’t the setting or the tree. It’s the look on his face. How something as small as a gift could lift him, if only briefly, out of everything else.
By the following Christmas, when I was ten, we were in another part of the city, another school, another attempt at stability. I don’t remember the presents from that year.
What I remember is what came after.
The Christmas That Changed Everything
My grandmother died.
She lived in Ontario, but no matter where I was, she wrote to me. Letters, every time. I can still see her hands in my memory, arthritic and bent, holding a pen anyway. Writing anyway.
Her death hit me harder than I understood at the time. And it changed the shape of everything.
My mother went to Ontario for the funeral, leaving us with my father. During that period, he was arrested in connection with his alcohol use. When my mother returned, a social worker entered our lives.
I remember being afraid in a way that lived in my body. The kind of fear that tightens your chest and refuses to loosen.
The social worker told me he understood how I felt.
I didn’t believe him.
I was so angry that I punched him in the nose. It gave him a bloody nose. Then I ran to my room.
Later, my mother spoke to me about it. She was shocked. I had never been an aggressive child. I told her I didn’t understand how he could understand, because none of it had happened to him.
After that Christmas, I never saw my father again.
Carrying What Wasn’t Ours to Carry
From then until I was fifteen, Christmas carried weight. Often it meant comforting my mother while she tried, and sometimes failed, to be present for my younger siblings. I held her while she cried. I learned early how to make space for someone else’s grief by shrinking my own.
At fifteen, I moved out on my own. Christmas changed form. I visited. I showed up. But something essential had already shifted.
At seventeen, my mother moved with my brother and sister to Quebec. Just before my eighteenth birthday, I followed them, to help support the family. My brother hated it there. After my eighteenth Christmas, he returned to British Columbia.
Becoming the One Who Gives
At twenty-two, I had my first child.
Christmas changed again.
This time, it wasn’t about what I felt. It was about what I could give. About creating warmth where I remembered cold. About making room for wonder, even when I didn’t always know how to conjure it.
That became my way forward. Year after year, I tried to give my children what I hadn’t had. Stability. Presence. Something they could rely on.
I didn’t do it perfectly. But I did it deliberately.
The Year That Divided Everything
Then came Christmas 2001.
Some years don’t simply pass. They divide a life into before and after.
That year, my first marriage ended. My third child was born. And only weeks after his birth, my mother died suddenly. Grief and responsibility arrived together, so close there was no space between them.
That Christmas, I had no real relationship with my younger siblings. Whatever threads once connected us had worn thin. The family I had grown up with no longer felt reachable, or perhaps no longer existed at all.
For the first time, I felt truly alone.
Not lonely in the casual sense, but alone in the deeper way that comes from standing without a net. Without a place to fall back into. Without anyone who could take the weight, even briefly.
And yet, I had children.
So I did what I had learned to do long before. I stayed upright. I focused forward. I carried on.
My children became my Christmas miracle. Not in a sentimental way, but in a grounding one. They gave shape to days that might otherwise have dissolved. They gave direction to grief that could have turned inward and hardened.
They became my northern star.
The reason I pushed through.
The reason I continued.
What Remains
As the years passed, Christmas brought both joy and sudden loss. We lost people we loved. We learned how fragile moments can be.
Now, as I enter another season of life, I find myself approaching the last Christmases of my youngest children. With that comes reflection.
If I could speak to my younger self, I would tell him to begin healing sooner. I think Christmas could have been lighter. More open. More magical.
But I am also grateful.
Grateful that I turned outward instead of collapsing inward. Grateful that my children had something steadier than what I knew. Grateful that I now stand on the threshold of becoming a grandfather, with the chance to show up again, more gently, more present.
This is what I’ve learned: No matter how dark the days become, there is always light. Sometimes you have to search for it. Sometimes it appears so clearly you don’t know how you missed it before.
And Christmas was never about what sat under the tree.
It was always about what stood around it.
The people you love.
The people you sit beside.
The people who stay.
That is what endures.
