12/24/2025
If you’re facing Christmas without someone you love, I need you to hear this first: you are not failing at the holidays.
There is no gold star for “handling it well.” There is no award for showing up cheerful, composed, and emotionally appropriate at all times. Some of you are holding it together with one hand and a paper plate of Christmas cookies in the other, wondering how it became possible to both miss someone and still need to figure out what’s for dinner.
That’s not weakness. That’s grief doing exactly what grief does.
Christmas has a special talent for turning absence into a spotlight. Empty chairs feel louder than full rooms. Stockings don’t just hang there, they stare at you. Songs you’ve heard a thousand times suddenly hit like a freight train in the grocery store, right next to the eggnog display, where you absolutely did not plan to cry in public. Again.
And here’s the thing no one says out loud enough: joy and grief are not opposites. They coexist. You can laugh at a dumb joke and cry ten minutes later and neither cancels the other out. You can love Christmas and dread it at the same time. You can miss them fiercely and still be grateful for the people who are here. None of that means you’re doing it wrong.
It just means you loved deeply.
Grief is not a sign that your faith is weak or that you’re “not trusting God enough.” It is evidence that someone mattered. That something real existed. And God is not threatened by your sadness. He is not tapping His watch, waiting for you to move on already.
If anything, Christmas tells us the opposite. God didn’t send Jesus into a polished, pain-free world. He stepped straight into the mess. Into loss. Into broken families. Into people who were tired of waiting for things to be made right. He didn’t come to pretend pain away. He came to sit in it with us.
So if this Christmas feels quieter, heavier, or different than it used to, that doesn’t mean God is absent. It means you are living in the space where love and loss overlap. And that is a sacred space, even when it hurts.
You are allowed to skip traditions that feel too hard. You are allowed to keep the ones that feel like oxygen. You are allowed to talk about them, or not talk about them, or suddenly cry halfway through a story and then say, “Sorry, I thought I was okay,” when you clearly were not. That is all completely acceptable human behavior.
And listen, if all you manage today was to get out of bed and eat something, even if it was a whole XL sized chocolate bar, you can still count that as a win. If you laugh unexpectedly and then feel guilty for it, you don’t need to. Laughter is not betrayal. It’s survival.
God is not disappointed in your heaviness. He is close to the brokenhearted, even on Christmas. Especially on Christmas. And He is gentle with the parts of you that are still hurting, even years later.
So take the day at your own pace. Step outside if you need air. Step away if you need quiet. Hold the memories that hurt and the ones that make you smile. Both belong.
You don’t have to carry this season perfectly. You just have to carry it honestly.
And if you find yourself laughing through tears and thinking, “Wow, I didn’t expect that,” congratulations.
That’s love still showing up.
