recalling the midnight hour last week

When they are finally all asleep I sort the gifts and stuff the stockings.

I wander to the fridge and snag a leftover deviled egg.

I sit by the tree and look at its lights.  I love its pretty sparkliness.  And I’ll love getting it out of the living room as soon as the Christmas bells stop ringing.

I place the wrapped books gently at the foot of each sleeping child.

I kiss that special spot on the bridge of their noses that I’ve been kissing since birth.

Touch their chins and their cheeks.  Especially my big kiddos.  Because I can’t caress them as much when they are awake these days.

I walk back down the stairs – 17, 16, 15 – pick up the scissors resting on 14 and don’t even bother to wonder why scissors are on the steps.

I pass the kitchen table, littered with plates and paper and cups and game pieces left by the kids.

I go back to the fridge.  This time it’s a buckeye.  And why not?  It’s Christmas.

It’s the quietest kind of quiet and the mixed bag of lonely and alone and those aren’t the same thing.

Christmas Eve.  Christmas Day.  All of it. It wasn’t the same and everyone in our house felt it and knew it and carried the weight of that in different forms.

Is it alright to say that it was a day that held its slivers of hope and promise but it is also a day that I am glad has passed?