Every year when decorating the tree on Christmas Eve at my mother’s there comes a point when we become still and fall silent. We oftentimes wait until Christmas Eve to decorate the tree in order to have everyone there. It makes for a much more precious and meaningful experience as each ornament is taken out of a box, unwrapped from its tissue paper, or untangled from other ornaments.

You see, our ornaments are pretty much all handmade. An odd, silly yet sacred assortment of five children’s yearly craft projects. Ornaments of felt, glitter, popsicle sticks, tinfoil, metallic painted dixie cups turned upside down as bells, pipe cleaners, puffy ink, styrofoam shapes covered with sequins, velvet ribbons, tiny metal jingle bells, even simple ceramic ones. Basically anything could be reimagined and repurposed to become a Christmas tree ornament.

Each year my mom suggests we weed out the ones that are 50+ years old, the ones where love has rubbed off the glitter, or has broken points of a star, and each year we push back with a group “NO WAY MOM!” Then we return to placing our “priceless antiques” on the tree, chattering about ordinary life – until that moment of silence suddenly stops us. It means someone has found my brother Paul’s ornament. It’s a ceramic one, in the shape of a Christmas present with his school picture glued right in the middle. He made that ornament about a month before he died, and it was his Christmas gift to my mom.

He made that ornament about a month before he died, and it was his Christmas gift to my mom. The silence fills the room with overwhelming grief. Share on X

The silence fills the room with overwhelming grief. We all silently look at each other as tears fill our eyes, tears full of a love that has no time or boundary, bringing each us to life. It is an invitation to meet the silence, and each other, with all of who we are. He is brought to life as we each begin to chat about him deep into the night. We are touched at the deepest place when we can turn ourselves over to life and stand on the edge of realness with others.

Each year we never know when that silence that is so fragile and so powerful, will happen. Yet when we allow it to penetrate our own interior and risk sharing it with the grieving soul standing next to us, we can truly recover the light that is beyond words and understanding. The love and light which shines from each of us. The shimmer that is the true meaning of this holy night, this silent night.