Christmas in Heaven?

This morning as I sat in my recliner sipping coffee on the morning of the “Day-After-Christmas“, I began thinking about what Christmas must have been like for my loved ones in Heaven.

This rather odd thought came to mind as I looked around my living room at all of the framed photos of those I loved and whom I was no longer able to hug their necks and tell them that I loved them at yesterday’s family gathering at my eldest brother’s and sister-in-law’s children, food and joy-filled home for Christmas.

Photos of those absent from Christmas this year include my beautiful wife of 23 years who celebrated her second Christmas in Heaven this year. The wonderful memories of so many Christmases past with her remain fresh in my mind and heart, and although they are tinged with pain and sadness, while still present, they are thankfully not as acute as they were last Christmas.

As I scanned the room, other photos began to speak to me from a more distant past, including those of my Father, Mother, Mother-in-Law, and even of our loyal Jack Russell Terrier, “Tugboat”, who loved Christmas like a child!

In the next room is box after box of more photos of family, friends, and others, both known and unknown from by-gone days, including many Daguerrotypes or “Tin-Type” photos printed on metal plates, some even stretching as far back as Civil War times and stored in albums worn smooth by more than a 150-years of hands that too might have reflected my morning’s thoughts.

As I mentally travelled back through my family’s history, which also parallels in part the history of photography, I see black and white and sepia-toned tin-types, many of them anonymous to me; faded photos from a “Brownie” camera printed on square, scalloped-edged, glossy photo paper; extremely faded early ’40’s and ’50’s Polaroid photos of good times at the beach; brownish-orange tinted snapshots from the ’70’s showing long-hair and beards from my college days, and finally to the many paper Kodak sleeves containing borderless, 4″ x 6″ prints and 35mm negative strips, taken in the last few decades of the late 20th-century. Of course, in the 21st-Century, most memories aren’t as tangible as they were in older days, after the world discovered digital photography, and while the number of family photos has expanded exponentially, most live unseen in a “digital-graveyard” in the Cloud. But I digress…

As I thought about all of these people in their hundreds, frozen in time and starring back at me from a time long gone, I wondered if, on some day-after-Christmas for them, they were perhaps thinking about family, friends, and loved ones that were missing from their Christmas yesterdays too, this thought linking us together as a family across time and space.

It then occurred to me that all of this reminiscing could cause a person to become quite sad and melancholy, or even depressed by such a journey through Christmases past. It was then that I looked more closely around the room in front of me, and I focused on the family Bible lying on a small table beside a treasured creche, its pages opened to the second chapter of Luke, and the story of the most famous and important Christmas in history, when a small family huddled around a babe in a manger on the very first Christmas.

Then a smile came to my face! This story must be the answer to my wonderings about all of those whom I can no longer hug or tell them “I love you!” and what it must have been like for them to celebrate Christmas in Heaven yesterday.  Because of that very first Christmas over 2,000 years ago, I realized that I received positive confirmation that my loved ones who were in the presence of the Prince of Peace yesterday, experienced the ultimate in Christmas celebrations!

Suddenly, my mood changed from a pensive and melancholy one with the persistent pain of loss in my heart and mind to one with a warm and highly comforting mental image of the “other” Christmas party that was going on yesterday, somewhere just over the distant horizon from where we all live, which points the way to all of our Heavenly Christmases to come.

So, for all those who may have been experiencing their own “day-after-Christmas” thoughts this morning about their missing loved ones, and also to those loved ones who come after me who may too one day reflect back on those missing from their Christmas, I’ll leave you with this thought –

Pick up your Bible and read once again about the very first Christmas, then close your eyes and try to picture that intimate Christmas scene before you. If you look closely enough, you just might see all of your loved one’s faces, as if in a gallery of photographs faintly floating behind the babe in the manger. Then smile, because, like those in heaven before them, they’ve reserved room for your photo in some Christmas to come, when you too will be in the loving presence of God in Jesus, who offers to gather us all that believe in Him to His side. And for those like me who have been left behind for a while, be in good cheer and take comfort in knowing that your missing loved ones who were once with you in person, are still with you, although temporarily separated, and that they had the most awesome Christmas of all yesterday, thinking of you!

Merry “Day-After-Christmas” to You and Yours!

Walter Franklin Davis