Christmas gift tag

Christmas time.  Whew, the Christmas season is upon us.  The first Christmas without Ryan.  Christmas Eve is the six month anniversary of Ryan's death.  Half a year.  How does half a year go by both so swiftly and also so agonizingly slow?  

To be honest I really braced myself for this season to be quite horrific.  I thought it would be too much to handle, that the overwhelming sorrow of grief would re-consume me all over again.  And I am a Christmas person.  I love Christmas.  I love the lights and the carols and the candles and the joy.  But it is because I love the joy of Christmas that I knew this one would be terrible.  How is there any joy when half of me is gone?  How do I "celebrate" anything when Ryan is gone?  How do I "do" Christmas?

But somehow it is never the "big" things that bring me to my knees in sorrow.  It is the little, most unexpected, things.  I have been pretty brave about putting up our Christmas tree, we hung a few lights, and I even mailed a handful of Christmas cards (count yourself lucky if you received one...).  I could not bring myself to hang the stockings though.  A mantle with three stockings would not look right and a fourth empty stocking did not seem right either.  So I just settled on skipping the stockings altogether this year.  And I really was okay with that decision.

I began to think maybe this holiday thing won't be as bad as I had anticipated in my mind.  So today I settled in - I had Christmas carols playing, my tree lights twinkling, rain pouring down outside, and a mug of peppermint mocha nearby while I sat down to wrap gifts.  I actually felt pretty joyful.  I miss Ryan more than anything in the world, but I have come to a place where my pain and my joy can coexist.  Then the "little thing" hit me.  I wrapped a few gifts for my children and when I went to fill out the "from" part of the gift tags I froze.  I usually write from "Daddy & Mommy" on each package.  And I couldn't.  Every year I would usually do most of the shopping for our kids' gifts but I would sign them all as from both "Daddy & Mommy."  I slowly wrote from "Mommy" and then just cried at how wrong it looked.  The tag was missing something.  My heart was missing something.  Ryan's absence hit me like a ton of bricks there on that gift tag.  There was the consuming wave of Christmas grief.  Not in the tree decorating or light hanging, but in the simple writing of the first gift tag.