Column 11: December 23rd

On the traditions that never fully return

On December 23rd 2008, my grandmother died. She was buried the next day - Christmas Eve - a date that lives in most people’s memories as something warm, expectant, almost enchanted. For me, that year, it became something else entirely.

I remember that Christmas not by the gifts or the food or the lights, but by the absence. Everything felt muted, as though someone had turned the colour down on the world. The house was full, yet somehow empty. Even the air felt different - heavier, slower, stunned by the sudden reshaping of what had always been a familiar season.

And the years that followed repeated the pattern.

You would think grief softens itself, but it doesn’t. Not really. Each December returned with its own ache, its own reminder of what had happened and when. While other families slipped back into celebration, ours hovered somewhere between ritual and memory, unsure how to inhabit a holiday that now felt like a wound.

It took five or six years for tradition to begin returning in small ways - cautious, tentative, like a shy guest approaching the door. A dessert reintroduced. A song hummed quietly. A familiar decoration brought out of a box and placed on the table. But even then, even as the holiday slowly regained its shape, it was never what it had been.

There was still an empty seat at the table. Or three, if I count my grandfathers. Three absences that never fully learned how to sit quietly.

People talk about grief as if it is something you move through, cross over, finish. I’ve never found that to be true. It doesn’t disappear; it rearranges things and it comes in waves. Some days it makes you dive deep, other days the cold water just touches your feet. For my family, grief became part of the architecture of the season - invisible to others, unmistakable to us.

Every December 23rd, I feel that old heaviness again - not as sharply as in 2008, but enough to remember that our lives were marked by this day. Enough to know that something ended then, and something else - quieter, more fragile - began.

I no longer expect Christmas to be what it once was. But I’ve come to accept the version it became: holiday shaped by loss, softened by time, held together by the people who remain.

I know now that, while some traditions return slowly, others never return at all. And perhaps that’s its own kind of truth - that love continues, but differently. So every year on this date, I pause and remember her. Not just the loss, but the years before it: the warmth she brought, the steadiness she embodied, the way she made Christmas feel like something whole.

Now, it is not the same. It will never be the same.

But it is still ours.