Hard Holiday

Yesterday was tough for me. A lot of feelings came up, mostly thinking about what I was doing a year ago. Last year I was spending the majority of my days in the hospital being with my mother as she lay dying. I can't tell you how thankful I am that I didn't go to California for Christmas this year. I think that might have been too painful.

However, there is something rather cool about the cemetery that my family is in. It's Rose Hills and it's huge. One would think nothing of saying, "I'm going to go down to Rose Hills and check out the decorations." It is amazing how some of the graves are decorated for the holidays. One that is not too far from my family's graves has Christmas dioramas encased in plexiglas. You look all around and there is a sea of red from all the poinsettias. Some families come and put up Christmas trees, or outline the graves with tinsel garland. It is actually neat to go look and see how some include their deceased loved ones in their holiday celebrations. For some of you, it may seem really strange, but it is something you have to see to appreciate.

Today I distracted myself by working on needlepoint and watching the DVD of Amazing Race 7. I'm way behind on my DVD watching, but I really enjoy those races, so I thought I'd watch that today because it's not overly serious. What's cool about the DVDs is that you can watch some of the episodes with commentary. I may do that at a different time, but the chit chat was too distracting when I tried it. They superimpose it over the show. There is also an option that you can select that shows extra footage. It's cool. They put a little pedestrian sign up and you hit the enter button on your remote when it shows up to get there--then when it's done it resumes where you left off.

I think that the distractions helped keep me from having another hard day.

One more thing I have to comment on. There was an article in the paper earlier this week that talked about how many of the churches were going to be closed today because Christmas should be with family. First, aren't we all the family of Christ? Second, they are finding celebrating the birth of our Savior too distracting to worship him on that day? I just think that it's a bit odd and could be construed as hypocritical.

Okay, I will confess that I didn't go to church today, but it was more because it has been really hard for me to go to Christmas services since my dad died. Someday I will overcome that, but this was not going to be that year and I knew that already so I don't feel guilty about it.