Now we are in low orbit around Christmas Day itself, I realise how I am slightly dreading it, since everything has changed in my life since last Christmas.
Encapsulated in that sentence is the power of the Christmas tradition: it makes us think back and compare, joining this year to the long line of Christmases in our past.
It interests me how all traditions like this are a kind of reified continuity. A way of manifesting the passage of time in the world, in a way we can hold on to and share. Continuity in community, or maybe the other way around.
So I do not dread Christmas: the important change is the fracturing and remaking of my familial community, which is most evident in the times of family tradition. A change that requires work.