Dec. 22, 2019

I hope I’m in the minority when I say this; but from my perspective, 2019 has brought a lot of loss.

I know so many people who will be experiencing their first Christmas without a parent, without a spouse, without a sibling and even without a child.

I think the “firsts” are always the hardest when you’ve lost someone close to you, but the truth is the hole always is there. And, for me, when that surfaces at Christmas, I revisit a message I read many a Dec. 25 growing up that never meant as much as it does to me today.

So I thought I’d share it with you.

It comes courtesy of Dick Feagler, a revered longtime columnist who wrote for my hometown newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

The headline was always the same: “Christmas at Aunt Ida’s house.”

Feagler first would acknowledge the issues of the day. If he were writing it in 2019, he might say that today was not a day to write about impeachment and trade wars but instead a day to “rest our weary brains” and “turn our back on earthbound stars.”

“Let us visit some people whose names get into the newspaper only when they die,” he wrote. “And even then, just in the tiny type of the death notices.”

And then, The Plain Dealer would go on to print the same column on the front page year after year because we Clevelanders had come to make reading this message our own holiday tradition.

Feagler’s writing took us to his Aunt Ida’s house, not far from the city’s steel mills, where his family would gather.

“On Christmas, we’d all be there,” he wrote “The old folks, the young folks and the kids. The young folks were the young men and their wives still recovering from the great upheaval of World War II. The old folks could remember World War I.”

He goes on to detail the characters in his family, including column namesake Aunt Ida, whose memorable personality brings a gathering like this to life.

We do this in my family too, by the way. From the time I was old enough to remember, our family has gathered at my parents’ house every Christmas Eve. We have our share of characters too.

In my scene, there are my grandparents, the World War II generation a few decades after Feagler met them. One of my grandfathers would arrive Christmas Eve with trays of homemade pizza. My grandmother would be right behind him with her own stacked trays of homemade cookies. My other grandpa would be stirring a punch bowl while my grandma looked at every ornament on the tree.

My aunts and uncles would be telling stories, joking around and humoring me when I produced a Christmas play for the evening’s entertainment.

My cousins and I would be poking around a hallway, where presents waited to be opened, keying in on names on the gift tags.

My mom would be managing the evening, from the appetizers to the wrapping paper and everything that came in between.

My dad would roam around with the best camcorder 1987 had to offer, capturing it all. Thank goodness.

Most of the people in the scene Feagler recalled are gone now.

Some of the ones in mine are too.

“Time is the inevitable eraser,” Feagler wrote. “But it does not erase cleanly. If you look hard enough, you can still see traces of them all, faintly. And if you look even harder – why they are right here!”

I don’t want to spoil the narrative of the rest of the column – you can read it here and enjoy the nostalgia as I do – but I do want to leave you with the closing thought as Feagler allows himself one last look back.

“Almost all of the people we see there are gone now. But they haven’t gone far, and on Christmas they are very close. They are just the other side of the windowpane,” he wrote.

“We can’t see them. But we feel them there, those simple people who loved us and took care of us. They left us blessings we too rarely count. And, if we let them, they come back at Christmas with gifts of everlasting life.”

Merry Christmas. May your holiday gatherings ahead be as memorable as mine and Feagler’s. And may his words remind you that the ones we loved and lost will be there too.