I'll Be Home for Christmas

♪ “I’ll be home for Christmas . . . .”♪  My dad would tear up as the familiar tune began. It was his favorite Christmas song, but also bittersweet, bringing back memories of the years he couldn’t be home for Christmas with his young family, his little boy and baby girl. Drafted against his conscience in WWII, but feeling duty-bound by his oath to heal the sick and wounded, he spent the war years far from home in the Philippines. Christmas was an especially difficult day when “snow and mistletoe” and the “lovelight” of home seemed particularly far away.

Years after the war was over, he was often called out on Christmas Eve for late-night emergency surgeries, and he’d be driving back late on snowy roads, and as a child I often worried that he wouldn’t be home safe for Christmas. Then early every Christmas morning, he’d put on his bright red vest and head to the hospital for rounds.  As much as my dad reveled in being home with his family on Christmas, I suspect his favorite moments were bringing some holiday cheer to those who couldn’t be home for Christmas.

So many can’t be home for Christmas, whether due to illness, incarceration, family turmoil, domestic violence, war and displacement, or simply because they have no home. In the US, the problem of inadequate affordable housing has given rise to increasing numbers of unhoused. Between 2019 and 2023, the numbers of those experiencing homelessness for the first time increased by nearly 25%, and more than half of these are without shelter of any kind. The end of Covid funding and moratoria on evictions has helped to fuel this increase, but so have rising rents, up 18% in the past five years, and the cost of housing, up 89% in the past five years, and simply not enough homes to meet the need. After watching enough “Call the Midwife” Christmas specials where they always manage to find permanent housing for those in need, I thought perhaps London does it better, but despite their best efforts, including sheltering people temporarily in B&B’s across the city, what they call “rough sleeping” has increased astronomically, with over 10,000 people sleeping on the streets during the year.

In our small city, it’s estimated that 30 families, 59 children, and 1135 individuals are without shelter. Despite the efforts of CHUM, Damiano, AICHO, Life House —the non-profit organizations devoted to providing food, shelter, and other assistance to the unhoused, along with a few Catholic Worker community houses, and a new shelter for youth, Another Door -- life on the streets is precarious. A few nights ago, a few hundred of us gathered outside City Hall to honor the lives of the 61 unhoused people, as well as the five advocates, who had died here in the past year.  Here at least these were no longer statistics. Each person’s name was read, their faces and ages held on placards honoring their memory, many of the ages far too young. They were given honor by the Cedar Creek drum circle and the placards were placed around the sacred fire. The spirit of love and compassion burned bright among those who had cared for each other, who did what they could to ease their loneliness, hunger, and pain; to honor and remember. 

It was a chilly night, around 20 degrees, and after standing in the cold for an hour, I was one of the lucky ones who had a place to go home to, where I could get a cup of hot cocoa and warm myself under a down comforter.  I got home in time to zoom into the Blue Holiday service at my son’s church.  It was a fitting postlude to the homeless vigil – naming the losses, the sorrows, the griefs that seem magnified at this “most wonderful time of the year.”  I was grateful for the welcome given to my tears, for the candles lit for my loved ones lost. For in my small circle are those I love who will never be home for Christmas again – my sister, Jeannie, and my sister of the heart, Pamela.

“When we’re homesick it’s not for places, so much as the faces of the people that we know. . . ,” sang Sara Thomsen and Paula Pedersen in the final song of their annual holiday concert. Without these beloved faces, I wonder if I will ever be home for Christmas again. But then the last line of the chorus took on a different meaning for me . . . “leave a little light in the window, I might be home.” What a lovely thought, I mused to myself. They might be home.  I only need to leave a little light “shining in [my] eyes when I think of [them].” 

As part of the Blue Holiday service, we were invited to summon our love and extend that love and light to others who might be in need of it this season.  It is in the giving, after all, that we replenish our wellsprings of love. I only need to leave a little light in the world. . . .“this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” 

That ultimately was the reason my dad chose to spend the war in army hospitals rather than in prison.  As he wrote in his journal on January 16, 1942, “If I stick to my original declaration of being a conscientious objector – and I am still objecting – I would probably have to go off to a CO camp for the duration of the war – or to prison. . . What would I accomplish by such a procedure? I would certainly be letting people know that I, for one, could not reconcile war with Christianity.  But would I not be hiding my candle under a bushel basket?”[i] Instead, he chose to shine his light of healing “to all alike – our soldiers, the enemy, and civilians.” His letters home at Christmas remarked on receiving the Christmas fruitcake.  I imagine he shared it with his fellow doctors, nurses, enlisted men, and patients, so that all could, for a brief moment, be home for Christmas.

. . . . .

I’ll be home for Christmas this year, though without my sister and my friend, home will be a little different.  But it will also be brightened in new ways. This is the first Christmas our grandson, Marty, is old enough to delight in the Christmas stories and songs, in “Frosty the Snowman” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” but mostly he’s enchanted by the lights. So on Christmas Eve, we’ll light a little Christmas tree in his room, and the Solstice tree in our bedroom, and the Christmas tree in the living room, and then “leave a little light in the window,” and one “by the backdoor, too,” and with great gladness welcome my son and family home for Christmas.

With wishes that all might find a way to be home, or to be a home for others, this Christmas and beyond.   

 

The ice candle leaving a little light by the back door — thanks Andrea.

 [i] The reference is to Matthew 5:15-16: “Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine. . .”