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Documentary reviews, body neutrality, parenting, Jupiter, piano, cats, European history, ghosts, rodents, the collapse of civilization, and if this goes on long enough I'll probably end up cataloguing my entire smushed penny collection.

Crying in Church on Christmas Eve

Despite serial sickness (cursed Christmas), most of us made it to church on Christmas Eve.

My mom still goes to the church I grew up in. The pianist at Christmas Eve service this year was the same woman who played the organ in church when I was a kid. She moved away, they took out the organ, and now that she’s back she plays the piano instead. It felt like stepping back in time to have her up there again.

And Mr. S was there. Mr. S has been doing the reading from Isaiah at the Christmas Eve service every year since I was a small child. He always gets about two sentences in before his voice starts to crack, his eyes get wet, and he is overcome by emotion. Every year of my childhood I would smile awkwardly from the pews, perplexed at this show of emotion from a normally very steady man.

“Oh good,” I thought to myself when I walked into the sanctuary and saw Mr. S sitting in the front pew. “It’s not really Christmas Eve unless Mr. S cries during the reading.”

The service started, we all stood to sing the first hymn, and I was suddenly, painfully aware of missing my grandpa’s tenor which should at that very moment have been booming out from behind me. My mind searched for my grandma, who should be beside me, whose voice I should hear most clearly as we all recite the Lord’s Prayer.

And there I was, crying in church on Christmas Eve. I had not even made it through the first hymn, let alone the first line of Isaiah.

It wasn’t even the music, or Christmas Eve, or the fact that my grandparents are gone. It’s just the end-of-year accounting of all the tragedies and the accounting of all the joys and knowing that there is more of both to come. It’s the all the big things and all the mundane things that have happened and will happen. It’s just all too much to keep inside.

I understand now. One day you’re a carefree six-year-old just hoping the service will end quickly so you can go play with the organ pedals while all the adults talk, and thirty-four years later you and Mr. S are both crying in church on Christmas Eve.

How could you not?