I have friends with lovely family traditions of traipsing into the woods together to cut down a fresh Christmas tree. Our family traditions are. . . a bit different. On Thanksgiving evening, I begin pestering my husband to haul the giant box with our artificial tree up from the basement. Once the tree has been retrieved, my husband and teenage sons settle in to watch football while I decorate it.

When the kids were little, they’d want to help, and I’d valiantly try to let them — only to quietly “fix” their creative contributions once they got bored and wandered off. 

At this point in life, I’ve surrendered any fantasy of a magical, made-for-TV moment and accepted the reality that trimming the tree is, in truth, a mostly solo mission.

Mostly, because my husband is 6’7″ tall, and my boys are now close behind, and every so often one of them might notice me balancing precariously on a dining room chair I’ve dragged over to the tree, and offer a bit of assistance. 

But this year, I found myself blissfully home alone for a few hours on Thanksgiving weekend, the tree already standing upright but bare, so I decided to take advantage of the quiet and dress it in peace. While balancing on said chair and attempting to drape garland on the highest branches, I discovered I could simply rotate the tree instead of rotating my whole body — brilliant! — until I twisted it just a little too far and the glowing lights blinked off.

I crawled under the plastic branches to discover I had rotated the tree so enthusiastically that I’d pulled the light cord taut enough to rip it clean in two. 

And so, this Christmas season began with me lying prostrate beneath my unlit tree, muttering regrets and contemplating my choices.

Ten minutes later, I was already inside the local hardware store estimating the cost of buying hundreds of new lights — or maybe just a whole new pre-lit tree — when my husband called to say he was on the way home. “Let me take a look at it before you buy anything,” he said.

Back at home, he inspected the mess, fetched a tool or two, and spliced the wires back together. As the tree’s lights popped back on, the Hallelujah Chorus played in my mind, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation – style (which is fitting, since watching this movie together is another one of our family’s delightfully unpolished Christmas traditions).

Sometimes, and especially this time of year, our expectations can get us in trouble. Christmas lyrics paint idyllic pictures of rosy cheeks, twinkling lights, and being “snuggled up together like birds of a feather.”

This is not always the reality. 

I may jest about my near-disaster with the tree, but we all know the world holds far darker corners than a strand of broken lights.

I appreciate the works and writing of pastor, parent, and author, Meredith Anne Miller, and a reminder she shares each year during this season: 

Christmas is not here to offer a four-week escape from the pain of the world with a paper-thin layer of twinkle lights. 

It is not here to anesthetize us with bows and eggnog lattes, nor to help us outrun the ache of life through piles of presents. 

Christmas is God saying, ‘Yes, this pain is too much. Yes, it is too sad. Yes, the ache is too great. Hang on. I’ll come carry it with you.’

Last weekend, I was feeling that ache — the sadness and messiness of living in a broken world — and told my husband it would help just to see the water. We took a drive and pulled into a beach lot overlooking Lake Michigan at sunset, which in December happens in the late afternoon. The wind was wicked and the temperatures were hovering in the lows 20s, and we hadn’t dressed for adventure, so we admired the view through our car windows. Just when we were convinced it was going to be a dreary, dud of a sunset, in the sun’s final descent, a sliver of sun cut through the clouds. Just a glimmer. But it was enough to change the entire hue of the enormous sky. To offer a glimpse of light and beauty.

I was recently formally introduced to the term “glimmer,” which was coined by Deb Dana, a clinical social worker who began writing a “Glimmers Journal” while her late husband, Bob, was dying. Dana says glimmers aren’t about pretending everything is fine, but are a way to train our brains to look for small moments of joy and connection so that we can face life’s inevitable pain without getting swept up in it. 

Similarly, I’m drawn to the idea of thin places, those locations or moments where the veil between the physical and spiritual feels unusually porous. “Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter,” writes Kerri ní Dochartaigh in Thin Places. “They are places that make us feel something larger than ourselves, as though we are held in a place between worlds, beyond experience.”

I don’t want an anesthetized Christmas. But I don’t want a cynical one either.

I cling to the hope that there is more happening than we can see — that we are infinitely loved and held, that God didn’t just come to earth once but comes still. That pain runs deep, but grace and justice run deeper.

I hold fast to the moments when the sun, the one we thought had vanished, manages to slice through the thick December clouds.

This season, I’m looking for glimmers — glimmers of heaven, glimmers of hope, glimmers of joy, glimmers of those thin places where heaven and earth mingle.