For as long as I can remember, Christmas has been bitter-sweet. The lights, the shopping, the energy all hold an excitement and a sense of deep melancholy; I find myself constantly encountering both joy and sadness as they jockey for position whenever holiday songs begin to burst forth from the radio.

My grandmother died when I was 8 years old, and although I don’t remember the time of the year, I remember it was a drizzly evening when she had a heart attack and went into the hospital. Additionally, I remember the chilly morning when I got up to get ready for school and my parents came in and told my sister and me that she had died. Whether the long months that spanned the time between her hospitalization and eventual death were actually during the holiday season, I don’t remember. But for the first time in my recollection, something dark and mysterious settled on me, and somehow I attributed a sense of sadness to the cold, dark season of Christmas in the Pacific Northwest.

In the 24 or so years since that first awareness of personal loss, I have lost many things: friendships, relatives, pets, dreams, time, and reality to name a few. Loss is part and parcel of the Fall, and it is felt deeply by all human beings conscious of their daily breath. While on the surface, the ideals of family unity and wish fulfillment collide in a mass array of stuffed turkey, holiday parties and tinseled trees, underneath the Christmas hoopla we are reminded that we are not perfect, that we are not fulfilled by what we find under the tree, and that perhaps in some way we are feeling our losses more deeply against the backdrop of oblivious holiday revelry. Some of you may toss me a “bah-humbug” at this point. Some may nod quietly.

In the last couple years, my Christmas sadness has deepened into a greater possibility than missing a lost someone or something or circumstance. The impetus to this change has come in the form of my children, whom God has used to alter my view of the world in more than a few ways. In regards to the birth of Christ, I have become intrigued by the relationship between Jesus and his mother Mary. I find myself amazed by the mother of Jesus who willingly said “I am a servant of the Lord, let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38) in response to the proposal that she-a virgin-would give birth to God in the form of a man who would surrender himself to every hardship imaginable and eventually die for the redemption of mankind.

I do not worship Mary. I am simply inspired by her humility. She willingly entered into the enormous inevitability of loss, and in this beautiful offering of humility, I find my Christmas sadness echoed. I think about holding my own babies; how their faith in my ability to care for them is far beyond deserved. Did Mary sit and hold the baby Jesus with such awe and amazement? Did she then catch a glimpse down the tumultuous path on which her baby would have to walk? I think she must have known deep in the well of her mothering-heart that she would have to let go of her beautiful little hero; that his life would not be easy: a marriage of pain and triumph. The bitter-sweet. The trial and the joy were set before her and she stepped forward in faith, hope and-albeit speculation-a bit of sadness. And so, my heart is affirmed by the possibility of the paradox.

This Christmas season I find myself exceedingly thankful for the gift of Jesus and-strange as it sounds-thankful for my Christmas sadness; I trust God to continuously mold it into a Godly response to the pervasion of sin and its ramifications that we experience every second of this life; to lead me constantly to the cross, and to keep me from putting down roots in a world that is not my home.

Melana Bontrager