The Blog of Christmas Eve
This post is late. It’s early January as I write this, which feels both ironic and fitting because December, for me, has always lingered. Christmas especially doesn’t end neatly on the 25th. It echoes. It settles.
It asks to be reflected on after the fact, once the noise quiets and what mattered most rises to the surface. So I’m allowing this December post to arrive when it needed to. Not on time, but honestly. When I think about December, about Christmas specifically, my mind doesn’t go to Christmas morning first.
It goes to Christmas Eve. It always has. That night holds a different kind of magic. Quieter, steadier, deeper. It’s the night where time slows just enough for people to find each other again.
According to tradition, Christmas Eve has long been a night of preparation and gathering. Historically, it marked fasting before feasting, waiting before celebration, darkness before light. In many cultures, it’s the night families come together. Sometimes more intentionally than on Christmas Day itself.
It is anticipation embodied. But beyond tradition, Christmas Eve is personal. It’s the night where everyone is there.
Where travel pauses. Where obligations soften. Where family, however defined, occupies the same physical space and, for a few hours, the same emotional one. It’s not about gifts, really. It’s about presence. For me, Christmas Eve evolved over the years, but its importance hasn’t diminished. The faces around the table have changed. The houses have changed. I’ve changed. But the feeling, that collective pause, that sense of this matters has stayed remarkably intact. There’s something sacred about a night that asks nothing of you except to show up. Charles Dickens once wrote, “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.” I think Christmas Eve is the doorway to that practice.
It’s where intention is set. Where gratitude is felt before it’s expressed. Where love is made visible not through grand gestures, but through proximity. And maybe that’s why Christmas Eve often feels heavier with emotion. It carries memory. It carries absence. It carries hope.
It’s the night where those we miss are felt most strongly and where those we still have feel more precious.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to understand that Christmas Eve isn’t about recreating a perfect tradition. It’s about honoring continuity while allowing evolution. It’s about recognizing that togetherness itself is the gift that the act of gathering, of choosing each other for one intentional event, is enough. That realization inspired the story attached below.
I wanted to give Christmas Eve the spotlight she rarely receives. To personify her. To honor the quiet labor she performs year after year. Bringing people home to each other, creating space for connection, doing the unseen work that makes celebration possible.
This story is not about Santa or spectacle. It’s about service. About anticipation. About the sacred power of preparation and presence. About the night that holds us before the morning arrives.
So this December, late as it is, I offer gratitude for Christmas Eve. For family, however imperfect. For togetherness, however brief. For traditions that adapt instead of break.
And for the nights that ask us only to be.
Story of the Month
by me
The Visit of Christmas Eve
A Tale for the Season
I must tell you of Christmas Eve, though you think you know her already. You have marked her on your calendars, circled her in red, anticipated her arrival with the eagerness of children awaiting gifts. But I tell you truly, you do not know her at all.
She is not what you imagine.
While the great Santa Claus receives all the world’s attention, all its songs and stories, all its wonder and belief, Christmas Eve moves through the darkness like a whisper, like a held breath, like the space between heartbeats. She is discreet where he is jolly. She is mysterious where he is known. She is unsung, and perhaps just perhaps that is precisely as it should be.
For Christmas Eve does not come with fanfare.
She arrives in the afternoon’s fading light, when shadows grow long, and the world begins to slow its frantic pace. She slips through doorways left slightly ajar, moves along streets where lights begin to twinkle, touches the frost on windows with fingers gentle as prayer. She brings with her no bag of toys, no reindeer bells, no Ho-ho-ho to announce her presence.
What does she bring, you ask?
Preparation. Anticipation. The subtle magic of becoming.
Where she walks, hearts begin to open. Old grievances seem suddenly small. Family members traveling from distant places find their journeys smoothed, their impatience transformed to eagerness. In kitchens, hands that have been hurried all day slow their work, finding rhythm and even joy in the rolling of dough, the stirring of pots, the setting of tables with care.
This is her doing, though none credit her for it.
Christmas Eve touches the child who cannot sleep and whispers, “Rest will make tomorrow sweeter.” She steadies the father’s hand as he assembles the bicycle in the garage at midnight. She guides the mother who wraps the last gift with tears in her eyes, remembering her own mother who did the same. She settles over households like a blanket, bringing with her a peculiar peace, not the peace of silence, but the peace of rightness, of things falling into their proper places.
She is the curator of togetherness, the architect of gathering.
Watch her work, if you can catch sight of her at all. See how she moves through the grandmother’s house where three generations will soon arrive, adjusting a picture frame here, straightening a wreath there, her presence ensuring that every detail speaks of welcome. Observe her in the humble apartment where a single parent has done their best with little, how she makes the simple decorations glow with worthiness, with enough-ness.
Christmas Eve knows a secret that Santa, for all his magic, does not: the gift is not in the giving alone, but in the space created for giving to occur. She is that space. She is the pause before the celebration, the breath before the song, the darkness that makes the morning light so precious.
And yet, and here is the peculiar sadness of her station, the night does not belong to her.
It belongs to the families she has prepared. It belongs to the children she has helped to settle. It belongs to the lovers who walk hand-in-hand through snow-dusted streets, to the friends who gather for cocoa and carols, to all the souls she has gently guided toward each other. She creates the conditions for bonding, for feasting, for festivities and games and laughter, for the spreading of that particular fullness that only this night can bring.
Then she withdraws.
She is too humble to remain where she is not the center, too wise to intrude upon what she has helped to create. Unlike Santa, who arrives with spectacle and departs with legend, Christmas Eve simply…fades. She becomes the background hum, the atmospheric blessing, the forgotten architect of the very magic others will remember.
By morning, all will speak of Christmas. Of Santa’s visit, of gifts exchanged, of the meal shared. But who will remember Christmas Eve? Who will credit her patient work, her subtle preparations, her quiet transformation of ordinary hours into sacred time?
Very few. Perhaps none at all.
And yet she returns, year after year, faithful as the turning of the calendar, constant as the winter dark. She asks for no songs, no cookies left out, no tracking of her progress across the globe. She requires no belief to do her work; she simply does it, for the work itself, for the love of what comes after.
So tonight, when the sun sets, and that particular hush begins to fall, when you feel the air change and something inexplicable stir in your chest that is her. That is Christmas Eve, making her rounds, weaving her gentle enchantments, preparing the way for all that is to come.
She is the guiding star of anticipation itself.
She is real, though unheralded. She is present, though unseen. She is the living embodiment of service without recognition, of giving without receiving, of magic worked for its own pure sake.
And if you listen very carefully, in that space between afternoon and night, between the ordinary day and the extraordinary one to come, you might just hear her not speaking, for she is too discreet for that, but breathing. Hoping. Blessing.
Working her quiet wonders while the world waits for someone else entirely.
That is Christmas Eve. That is her story.
And now you know her, just a little better than before.
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