It’s so hard to believe that tomorrow is Christmas Eve…it’s so easy to lose track of the days out here. Besides, as I know I’ve said before – Christmas out here doesn’t really …feel …like Christmas.
Christmas ship-side is all glitz and glamour and sunshine and man-made magic. Yes, we can make snow where there should be no snow, we can track Santa Claus on our radar and we have some of the most beautiful Christmas trees many people have ever seen but it’s all…missing something.
At least it is for many of the crew. You really are so busy creating Christmas for everyone else out here – that is for the people who are paying to be here – that you don’t really have time to feel it for yourself. Sad as it is to say, absent from our families (both blood and ‘adopted’), absent from all the people that your heart misses so very much, December the 25th runs the risk of becoming just another day.
Though you can’t show that of course.
Most of us have Christmas before we even board. I imagine it’s a lot like families who have loved ones in the armed forces; you simply transplant holidays, celebrating them when the people who matter to you are at your side instead of miles away. If that means we celebrate Christmas in July? Well that’s what you do. For my part, I had a near perfect Christmas three days before I boarded the plane for San Francisco; there was only one person missing, and that couldn’t be helped. In fact it felt so much like Christmas that we kept forgetting that it was only the 15th…
Which goes to show you that it isn’t the date that’s important; it never has been. It’s not where you are, or what you’re doing. It’s about the people you love, the people your heart needs, the people who give your soul its wings.
And if you think of it that way…well then Christmas will come…whatever the time of year…whether you have a nine foot tree or not a single strand of tinsel…