December 12, 2005

You know how much I love Christmas?  Everything about it - the whole advent season, Christmas trees, Christmas shopping, Christmas music, Christmas Eve service, etc.  

I think I get part of that from my grandmother.  She loves it.  On the day after Thanksgiving every year we decorate her house.  Several trees, a mantle with stockings for everyone in my family, quite a few nativities, outdoor greenery & lights...everything.

Exhibit A, this is her table on Christmas.  Look like she's preparing for royalty?  Nope...just my family. 

On the day after Thanksgiving, 2005, we did just that...decorated her entire house with all of our favorite ornaments, favorite trees that she'd had for years, & decorations my mom & her siblings had made as kids.

17 days later, on December 12, their house burned down.  Of course that's never easy, but especially at Christmastime.  There are things about a fire that I never though of until it happened to my family.  The hard part is that so many things, you can still see...you know they're there...but now they're useless. 

We went through the house multiple times, dug through ashes to find things that might've survived.  For example, my grandmother had a metal recipe box with her mother's chocolate icing recipe in it.  We dug through ashes in the kitchen until we found it.  There was one frame in the house containing a poem my mom wrote for my grandparents.  We didn't remember exactly where it was, but we broke the glass on frames until we found it, burned, but still legible.  

My grandmother has always been an avid reader.  For insurance purposes, everything had to be counted.  So my cousin & I counted every book in that house that was still there.  And if you find books on my bookshelf that are black & smell smokey...that would be why.

I took their front door.  Burned to the point that the paint was peeling, & very likely rotten, but I still have it in our barn & hope to make a table out of it when I have a house one day.

So that Christmas was the hardest one for my family.  Instead of getting together at my grandparents, as we always had, we went to my aunt's.  Instead of my grandmother having a stocking filled for each of us, we had grocery bags.  

Those first few days, I didn't think a day would ever go by when I didn't think about the fire.  But many have.  I didn't think going to their house would ever be the same.  It's not.  That house was bulldozed & now a new house sits there.  Not a yellow one with the familiar brown carpet that I learned to crawl on, but a tan one with hardwood floors & all new furnishings.  The house is not the one I spent so much of my growing-up years in, but it still contains those two people that I love dearly & every memory our family has ever made.

Before we left to go home on the day we had decorated that year, I took lots of pictures of the house.  We used those pictures to remember what all needed to be counted in each room.  And I used them to paint a picture of that beloved Christmas tree.

It'll never be the same...but after 5 years, we've seen that that's okay.

#57. Isaiah 40:7