A Christmas Story

It’s been a different kind of Christmas season for us. Unlike the lavishly decorated Biltmore Mansion in Asheville where I took this photograph, our home this year is nearly as unadorned as the manger in a nativity scene.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Bonnie and I have recently downsized to a one-story ranch home. Even after getting rid of lots of our stuff, we still won’t have room for all our things until we finish building Bonnie's workshop and some additional storage and pantry space onto the back of the house.

In the meantime, it’s a chaotic scene. Some of our stuff is in storage units. Much of it is packed away inside the house, with boxes stacked high in a room that looks like an overstocked warehouse.

Which brings us to the Christmas story.

With so much stuff still packed away, we’ve been unable to find a lot of things, including most of our holiday decorations. We managed to retrieve our Christmas tree from a storage unit, along with two red-and-green plastic bins that hold some of our tree ornaments. The movers buried the rest of the holiday bins at the very back of the storage unit, behind Bonnie's woodworking equipment that's too heavy for us to budge.

Regrettably, we couldn’t get to the treasured ornaments that are most meaningful to us: the ornaments that were handmade by our kids when they were little … the ones given to us by family and friends … and the ones I put in Bonnie’s stocking each year as a holiday tradition, starting with our first Christmas as husband and wife in 1980.

We don’t have any of those special ornaments on our tree this year. We're also missing all the other holiday decorations that have been part of our Christmases for many years. The Biltmore has more than 10,000 ornaments on 36 fully decorated trees inside the sprawling mansion. By humble comparison, we have just one simple tree which is missing all of our favorite ornaments.

Our sparsely decorated home doesn’t look anything like the Biltmore Mansion. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t filled with warmth, joy and Christmas spirit.

I take heart in knowing that the ornaments that were hung on our tree were placed with loving care by family who gathered together to help us decorate the branches. We sipped eggnog, listened to holiday music and shared stories of Christmases past as we worked. In my heart, that made our tree as grand as the towering 35-foot Fraser fir in the Banquet Hall at the Biltmore.

In the end, it’s love that makes the holidays beautiful. Although we’re surrounded by mountains of unpacked boxes at our house this Christmas, we’re also surrounded by love – and that’s what matters most.

Happy Holidays, my friends. And warmest wishes for a Happy New Year.