A Christmas carol for the displaced, 2023 edition
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- December 3, 2023
- 852
I’m pulling one out of my Christmas column bag today. This column, initially written four years ago, hits a little bit harder today, and I’ve edited it to reflect why. I’m still seeking Christmas in all the ways we’ve been taught it should look like, but I’ve lost the thread once again in the horrors this world brings. I’ve never lost my faith, despite being told I need to hang on to it better. I want the Hallmark version of Christmas too, but it’s not realistic, which is why we continue to cling to it. Maybe, just maybe, we need to lift the veil and see a new thing.
My daughter was 10 years old when I lost her at a sports arena. For 20 of the longest minutes of my life, her name was being called over a loudspeaker while I frantically turned in circles. People began surrounding me, waiting, hoping and looking; I still can see the look on their faces as they watched me. I felt her name grow louder and louder on my tongue as the panic traveled and enlarged up my spine.
In these fraught circumstances, the thinnest of spaces to inhabit, you’ll do anything you can to find your children. Nothing matters — not how you sound, how you appear or are perceived. When she was found waiting by an exterior door and brought to me, I dropped to my knees and began to cry. Today it still makes me cry.
We would do anything to keep our children safe.
I’ve been told to walk an invisible line, one that has my name lightly traced on it. It’s a blueprint society wants to see you walk, not veer off or stray from. For most of my life, I’ve found myself walking in the dirt about 20 feet off that path. It can be rocky out here. I can still remember my daughter saying, “But I wasn’t lost, Mom,” and I tell her still — in my mind — “But you were lost to me.” I knew then that their paths, like mine, would never be straight and narrow.
Christmas is very near, and I feel the breath of it whisper in my ear. Many days I fear I’ve lost its meaning. It’s not found in the scurrying to and fro, and I find myself wanting to sit outside and feel the coldness of the day permeate my skin. Maybe I’ve found the meaning, after all these years, and the exacting horror of it, the opposite of coziness and merriment, strike me to the core.
We can’t change where we might exist in this world, but we can change how we view things.
For the truth, for the sake of all things we bear today, is that Jesus was born a refugee in a barn. His family was forced to flee from a campaign of terror by King Herod. In these most ethereal of days, when the veil between this world and that one become thin, ask yourself would you have let Mary and Joseph into your home? A weary and dirty travel-worn couple, Mary heavily pregnant, ready to give birth? Would we have said to them, “Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps and do better?”
We sing, oh how we sing to the baby Jesus in our comfortable pews and oh how we reject the very ones among us like them. We reject those who flood our own borders for relief, looking the other way as centers outgrow their numbers, as they perish from simple flu viruses and as shouts for a wall to keep them out swell around us.
I anguish as those who perilously crowd boats or walk on foot flee death and persecution in places in the Middle East, as refugee camps grow and burst at the seams, people in them languishing as they await papers so they can move on, as ethnic groups are being put in camps in China or are being ethnically cleansed in other places around this sphere we call earth, that horrific wars rage in places we truly can’t see from either end because of their complexity.
Some days I cry out to this man who was once a tiny babe lying in a dirty manger, a small, beautiful face with skin as brown as my morning coffee. He knows my lament and my sorrow. He knows that if he came to America 2023, he’d be rejected, relegated to a cage without the proper documentation.
I am seeking Christmas, not the one that pretends all is well and right. I want the version of Christmas that causes me to rethink everything I never had to think about as a comfortable American who walks 20 feet off the path. I want what allows me to feel lost, scrabbling for purchase, yet alive and probing. Christmas is not tidy and cozy. And I want to sit inside that and know I didn’t forget, nor try to make the reality of it disappear with a carol and a bow.
Melissa Herrera is a published author and opinion columnist. She is a curator of vintage mugs and all things spooky, and her book, “TOÑO LIVES,” can be found at www.tinyurl.com/Tonolives. For inquiries, to purchase her book or anything else on your mind, email her at junkbabe68@gmail.com or find her in the thrift aisles.