Christmas Morning

Winter – Week 51 – On Stars and Feasts

In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures – and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.

Christmas morning arrives in darkness here, the way it always has. This year the coyotes heralded it, singing their way through the neighborhood in the hours before dawn. Not the scattered calls we usually hear from the ridgelines, but something fuller, more deliberate. A chorus moving through the streets, announcing themselves to the winter dark. Earlier this week, my neighbor called it caroling, and she wasn’t wrong. They were conducting their own ceremony out there, claiming this particular stretch of night as their own.

I wonder what my father heard on his walk home fifty-one years ago this early morning. Not coyotes, the wrong continent, the wrong landscape entirely. But he would have heard something in that frozen British countryside as he made his way back from the hospital. Five miles through empty streets and village lanes because we didn’t have a car and there were no buses running, no taxis to be found. Just him and the Christmas star, the actual planet Venus, bright and unwavering, lighting his way home while his daughter had just been born, and his world rearranged itself with every step.

What must that have been like, letting it all settle into his bones? The joy and the terror and the absolute irrevocability of it. A single night becoming a threshold he’d cross over and over for the rest of his life. Every Christmas morning carrying that same walk home, that same moment when everything changed.

The new moon has been hanging in the evening sky these last nights, a perfect crescent glowing orange against the winter dark. It’s just beginning its journey toward fullness, this thin edge of light that will swell and round and then diminish again, cycling through its ancient rhythm. There’s something about watching that crescent wax toward fullness while I stand at the edge of fifty-one, my year of fifty complete. Mountains climbed both literal and metaphorical, continents crossed, quietness found in unexpected places. The moon beginning its cycle as I begin another. Not an ending, but a marker. A pause to acknowledge the distance traveled before continuing on.

The world around me has been busy with its own preparations. A few days ago I came home to find a Swainson’s hawk mantled over a rabbit on my neighbor’s lawn. The hawk was methodical, purposeful, pulling away tufts of white fur with the precision of someone unwrapping a long-anticipated gift. Fluff drifted across the yellow grass while the neighborhood went about its ordinary business. A Christmas feast for a king, spread out in broad daylight. The hawk paid no attention to the passing cars, to me standing there watching. It had caught what it needed, and it was going to take its time.

This is the calendar the wild world keeps, untroubled by what the date means, attending only to hunger and safety and the night sky’s familiar arc. While we wrestle with what Christmas should feel like, what this threshold asks of us, the natural world simply continues. And here we are, in this complicated season that insists on joy while so many of us are holding weight in our hands, trying to figure out where to put it.

My Mum is across an ocean right now. Friends I love are scattered across continents. There are people who should be at the table who won’t ever be again. Christmas keeps changing its shape, it has been changing for years. And I find myself grieving the versions we’ve left behind while simultaneously grateful for the versions we’re creating. Somewhere along the way I learned that when grief won’t leave, you gather it up and take it with you. You set an extra place for it at the table. You let it follow you like a shadow on your walk. The key isn’t to feel good all the time, it’s to go on living alongside whatever you feel.

And you’re allowed to feel this, all of it. You’re allowed to celebrate quietly, imperfectly, or not at all. You’re allowed to miss people and survive it. You’re allowed to be here, wherever here is, however it looks. Even if this year looks different. Even if life has changed in ways you didn’t expect. Even if Christmas morning finds you somewhere you never imagined you’d be.

My Dad must have understood something about carrying complexity on that long walk home. That everything had changed, that nothing would ever be simple again, and that somehow this was both devastating and miraculous.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to be born on this day. To have your arrival always entangled with celebration and obligation, with other people’s expectations of joy. To carry your birthday inside a holiday, inseparable from it. Fifty-one years of this now, and I still haven’t entirely sorted out what belongs to me and what belongs to the season. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe being born on a day like this means learning to hold multiple things at once: the personal and the collective, the quiet and the cacophonous, the grief and the gratitude. Maybe it’s practice for what we all have to do anyway: show up to our own lives even when the world is busy with something else entirely.

And here it is: Christmas morning, my morning. The sun rising on a world still turning, still singing its ancient songs. The crescent moon will return tonight, a little fuller than before. The wilds will continue their ceremonies, hunting and singing and following the rhythms it has always followed. And I will step into my new year the way that moon moves through its phases: letting it settle into my being, walking through whatever landscape stretches ahead.

So, at this edge we all share, wherever you are, however you’re holding this day:

May you find space for all of it: the celebration and the longing, the people who are here and the ones who aren’t. May you sing in the darkness when you need to, and know when to be quiet. May you take your time with whatever feast is in front of you. May you walk through the frozen streets of your own life with your head up, letting the stars – borrowed, burning, impossibly distant, light your way.

May you gather up what won’t leave and take it with you without apologizing. May you understand that going on living alongside whatever you feel is not resignation but courage, not settling but survival, not giving up but showing up, again and again.

And may you remember, when the darkness feels too long, that even the thinnest sliver of light is already waxing toward fullness. That every ending is also a beginning. That you are here, still here, and that is enough.

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—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane