Bye bye, Christmas.

Here's the last week of my Christmas journal:

I had kind of a hard time getting the last pages of this thing done. And it wasn't just the cold medicine and lack of inspiration. This was just a *blah* Christmas this year in a lot of ways. Being sick was the worst part, and missing out on seeing a lot of people. My parents were exhausted and stressed. My sister's family lost their grandpa just a couple weeks before. It was sad to see my grandma who is really just not herself anymore.

One of the really sad moments was being at my church's Christmas Eve service...it's almost always a chorus concert, and I sang in the chorus all through junior high, high school, and into college. Whenever I sit through the Christmas Eve service I always think about those years and years of previous services and how much fun they were.

The music director at our church all through those years was a great guy--smart, funny, just very, very nice. I really admired him. He committed suicide this past spring...I think it shocked almost everyone who knew him to the core. So I was sitting there on Christmas Eve listening to all those familiar voices, and thinking about all those other Christmas Eves with John directing the chorus, and I just couldn't get him out of my mind.

I got up to go to the restroom during a part where the chorus was sitting down and they were having some instrumental music, and who should I run into at the drinking fountain but John's sister. She is a fellow alto, and we stood next to each other in the alto section in the chorus.

I debated for a second whether to say anything to her about him, but I had been having such a strong sense of him, so I told her I was thinking about John. Her eyes filled with tears and she said, "I can hardly get through this night." We both just stood there and wept for a couple of minutes. It broke my heart and I still can't figure if it was right to mention him to her or not, since she had to pull it together and go back in and sing after that. I hope it helped her to know that someone else was thinking about him, too.

Sooo...just some sadness this Christmas. And this feeling that as the years go by, there will be other people I'll be missing as well. Ugh.

Not that there weren't lots of little lovely moments, too, because there were! I called them "moments of grace" in my last entry. These tiny things that connect you to the people you love, conversations, smiles, shared jokes and laughter. Thank goodness for those! I enjoyed my nephew Tanner and niece Kylie SO much this year...they are growing up into delightful people and it's fun to relate to them in a new way now that they're not "littles" any more. (Not that I don't adore the "littles" in the family--I do!) And my sweetie pie Todd makes every Christmas happy for me in a myriad of ways.

So the tree came down today and the journal is done, and I'm more than ready to move on from the holiday season and get my hands onto and into 2009.