It’s Christmas Eve again. In a week it’ll be New Year’s Eve. How did this happen? How did twelve months slip past so quickly?

Darned if I know. Each year I’m caught off guard, greeting the dusk of December with a flappety-wappety shake of the head and a startled WAIT, WHAT? TOMORROW IS CHRISTMAS? I’M NOT READY! I STILL HAVE TO WRAP GIFTS! MY ATTIC IS COVERED IN DOLLAR STORE TCHOTCHKES! MY FINGERS ARE RAVELED IN TAPE!

This is my usual M.O. I’m never ready for Christmas, but it always comes. And when it does, I cry.

On Saturday morning, writing a few end-of-year checks, I shed a few tears. Not buckets. Not cups. Not even thimbles. Just little saline markers of sentiment and reflection as I dwelt on gifts dispatched and received, on Christmases present and past, on people I love both here and departed.

On Saturday afternoon, running last-minute Christmas errands, I cried again. Again, not buckets. Again, just tiny hat-tips to my emotional state as I ticked through all who aren’t here, ruminating on the impermanence of life and the permanence of love.

Christmas does this to me. It loops around with joy and wistfulness, a tinsel-strewn reminder of love and the miracles it births – and not just the baby Jesus. It reminds me of everyone I’ve ever held dear, everyone who ever shared a piece of themselves with me, everyone who brought beauty and warmth into my orbit before leaving a little too soon. My husband’s laugh, my mother’s pluck, my father’s puns, my sister’s giant violet eyes: They’re gone now, and so are our Christmases together. Except they aren’t. The pea coat Mama gave me in December 1980 might be a tumbleweed of gnarled wool thread, but the gifts that matter endure.

Lives are linear; they begin and they end. But love is not. Love cycles back, coiling its way through moments as the years pile up behind me. And what is Christmas, after all, but an annual feast of love? The love of parents for their newborn? The love of God for us? The love of us for each other?

So the ghosts of Christmases past don’t haunt me, really. My tears, when they sneak up on me, speak less of grief and more of gratitude. They remind me to look up and out at the world. They remind me to love those around me — everyone who walks beside me in this world, hearts thundering, bellies laughing, taking my hand as I stumble.

They’re here with me now in this season of wonder, and I clutch them hard. I regard them with wonder, treasuring the gifts that they bring.

But now you’ll have to excuse me for a moment while I head up to the attic and finish wrapping presents, BECAUSE I’M NOT READY FOR CHRISTMAS.