This is going to be a special Christmas for all the wrong reasons. It will be my first without people I love who are dead. Just like last year. I have reached an age where most years ahead will include the death of someone I love. Right up to that Christmas that will be my last and I am the loved one who is mourned.

Every year brings other milestones too: obvious things like births, marriages, and graduations, as well as those little things that pop up in the middle of even the most ordinary years, like finding a new job or hobby or friend or love. Maybe every Christmas is special because every Christmas lights a fire in the heart of each person who celebrates it and for a short season the idea of peace on earth doesn’t sound like a punchline.

The inevitable question is a simple one: Why can’t we keep this feeling through the year? I haven’t yet heard a satisfactory answer. The only thing I see stopping us is a primitive fear that if we let down our guard and open ourselves up to that kind of love, bad people will take advantage of us.

Christmas in old age has almost too many memories. It becomes overwhelming to try to understand the world you were born into. How could things have been so different back then? When did the tinsel that hung on every tree disappear from drug store shelves? What happened to sending and receiving piles of cards? Every year some beloved Christmas tradition dies with the passing of its last adherent. It is good to remember them kindly as we will each eventually become a ghost of Christmas past to those we leave behind.

Until we get to the day when we become the Ghosts of Christmas Past, we would do well to take a page from the bard of the season, Charles Dickens:

There are people who will tell you that Christmas is not to them what is used to be; that each succeeding Christmas has found some cherished hope, or happy prospect, of the year before, dimmed or passed away; that the present only serves to remind them of reduced circumstances and straitened incomes – of the feasts they once bestowed on hollow friends, and of the cold looks that meet them now, in adversity and misfortune. Never heed such dismal reminiscences. There are few men who have lived long enough in the world, who cannot call up such thoughts any day in the year. Then do not select the merriest of the three hundred and sixty-five for your doleful recollections, but draw your chair nearer the blazing fire – fill the glass and send round the song – and if your room be smaller than it was a dozen years ago, or if your glass be filled with reeking punch, instead of sparkling wine, put a good face on the matter, and empty it off-hand and fill another, and troll off the old ditty you used to sing, and thank God it’s no worse.