Your Daily Dose of CHRISTMAS!!!

I always think it’s important to acknowledge that for all the twinkly-lights-and-gaiety that inform our typical notion of Christmas, those things can also set Christmas up for a bit of failure. For a holiday-festival like Christmas, which centers family and memory and other similar things, all the various memories that we associate with Christmas can’t be all-cheery, all-the-time. It can be remembering the last year Grammy visited at Christmas…and then, as the years go on, other memories add up. It can be the significant other who spent that wonderful Christmas with us…before the relationship ended the next year. It can be seeing your adult children having their own Christmases with friends and new family, while you remember the effort to make their Christmases magical when they were young. And it’s remembering those who aren’t alive anymore at all.

All the twinkly-lights-and-gaiety is wonderful and I love it, but I also believe very strongly in admitting that parts of this annual festival of ours are very hard. So, here are some Christmas songs that range from the bittersweet to the outright sad. This first is an annual feature here, because I often find myself thinking this time of year of the roads I didn’t take even as I think about the roads that may lie before me.

This one’s new to me this year:

Also new to me this year is this one. I discovered Sara Bareilles this year (we watched, and loved, Girls5Eva), and this maybe isn’t precisely a Christmas song at all. But I think it fits into the vibe for this post.