I am not myself tonight. Beside me a photo of my daughter Jess reflects soft lights from our Christmas tree. I trim the boughs and, like a man in a drunken stupor, kid myself I’m behaving normally. But I’m not. My hand shakes; my breath is short. I am bereft, broken, bereaved. My daughter died ten years ago next month. I realize with a start that I still need tending to.
It may be the same for you.
Researchers agree that it usually takes 3-4 years to put a death into perspective. During the first year, we are nearly incapable of long-term thought, therapists suggest. We should put off any major changes. The second year is hardest, mourners relate: each holiday or anniversary brings home the finality of our loss. It took me six years to feel a vague sense of normalcy. This is not to say I’m “myself” again; there is no such thing. Ten years later I know only that I am not the same.
Grief, like love, is a universal biological imperative that changes us. Special occasions take on new meaning. Our homes and relationships are redefined. Family gains significance. Life seems larger, more vital, more precious than before.
Because of this, our holiday traditions may change as well. While annual customs are healthy and necessary, some old rituals might be too heartbreaking. These we can stop completely. Others could continue in different ways, perhaps by lighting candles or preparing dishes that were treasured parts of the season.
One family, for example, sets a plate for their dead father when they eat Christmas Eve dinner. This ritual provides a time and place to revisit fond memories while simultaneously empowering them to face Christmas morning without him. Such moments are steeped in remembrance, smiles, and tears.
We may also create new seasonal traditions that include our dead in constructive expressions of love. Rituals like these are important for many reasons. They allow us to focus and channel our feelings; acknowledge lifelong loss; accept death as a reality; validate the life of our loved one; confirm attachment; provide structure for memory and sorrow; enable friends and family to participate; give vital emotional support; and facilitate context and meaning. These are good things. But they aren’t always easy.
Take our Christmas tree, for instance. The first few years after my daughter died, I asked myself why I should bother with it all. Nineteenth-century German poet Friedrich Rückert wondered the same thing.
On Christmas Day, 1833, Rückert and his throng of boys, as he calls his five sons, are arranging candles and candies for their holiday tree. His youngest child, three-year-old Luise, has the honor of placing an angel among the branches. This moment will haunt Rückert for many years.
The next day Luise falls ill with scarlet fever. She dies on December 31. Rückert’s youngest son, four-year-old Ernst, shows symptoms on New Year’s Day. He is already bedridden by his fifth birthday, January 4, and dies eleven days later.
“This has been a cruel, terrible winter,” Rückert writes in April of that year. “My two dearest children died suddenly and the others, my wife included, were in mortal danger for some time.” Over the first six months of 1834, Rückert composes some 500 poems on loss and mourning
“O Christmas Tree” is one of them. But not with the lyrics we know today.
The beloved carol “O Tannenbaum” (“O Fir Tree”) that we sing each year is based on a sixteenth-century folk song. It was first mentioned in David Sammenhaber’s lute book as late as 1590. Later Melchior Franck, court music director of Coburg, set down the melody. A modern composition was finalized in 1819 by August Zarnack, director of education at the Royal Military Orphanage in Potsdam.
The song’s Christmas connection came three years later. In 1824, Leipzig teacher Ernst Anschütz, relying heavily on moody tones used in post-Romantic poetry, edited the verse and added two more stanzas. By the mid-twentieth century, “O Tannenbaum” was second only to “Silent Night” in popularity among carolers worldwide.
Back in 1834, Rückert writes his own version of “O Tannenbaum.” He retains the tune’s rhythm and cadence, but any similarity ends there. He renames it “O Weihnachtsbaum”—“O Christmas Tree.”
O Christmas tree, O Christmas dream. How dark is your brilliance, how broken is the dance that, cut short, scattered your garland. O Christmas tree, O Christmas dream. The candles on each branch burned but halfway before, mid-celebration, we snuffed them out. O Christmas tree, O Christmas dream. The candies on each twig are uneaten, untouched. Ah, that you survived the ravages of revelry. O Christmas tree, O Christmas dream. With your virgin fruit, your unburnt candles, stand until Christmas returns, until their memorial day. O Christmas tree, O Christmas dream. When we light you again we need buy no angel: our pair will be here celebrating with us.
Rückert’s seasonal tree evokes painful, sacred memories of loss. When Christmas returns, he writes, they need place no angel on the branches: Ernst and Luise will be there with them. Rückert’s tradition, like mine, is borne not of sorrow, but of hope that we will see our loved ones again, a promise as old as Christmas itself.
Christmas trees were known in the fourteenth century as Paradise Trees, or Trees of Life, part of mystery plays that were performed in front of cathedrals on Christmas Eve, which was also the feast day of Adam and Eve. An evergreen was decorated with apples to symbolize the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden; it would also represent Christ himself as the Tree of Paradise.
Over time the plays were banned as too irreverent. Decorating public trees was thought to be a nuisance; so believers continued the tradition in their homes. They placed wafers on pines to represent the Eucharist. Later, sweets, cookies, and cakes shaped like the Nativity were set with fruit and candles among the branches. These in turn slowly evolved into the elaborate ornaments seen on modern Christmas trees.
By 1850 Charles Dickens is describing small tapered candles on a conifer, lighting a myriad of bright decorations, and “a merry company of children assembled round that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree.” But this tree, he muses, is more than a holiday ornament. It encourages memories that reunite the living and the dead:
A moment’s pause, O vanishing tree, of which the lower boughs are dark to me as yet, and let me look once more! I know there are blank spaces on thy branches, where eyes that I have loved have shone and smiled; from which they are departed.
Dickens grasps with keen insight the importance of remembrance during our holidays: “Lost friend, lost child, lost parent, sister, brother, husband, wife, we will not so discard you!” Loved ones remain part of Christmas in our hearts and our traditions, Dickens writes.
Clinicians have found that while mourners suffer an increase in psychological distress throughout the Christmas season, these special occasions also provide a chance to pause and reassess what matters to us. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had a kindred thought:
The holiest of all holidays are those Kept by ourselves in silence and apart; The secret anniversaries of the heart.
I too have secret anniversaries. My daughter’s birthday is November 29. We always celebrated it over Thanksgiving weekend, putting up a tree and placing her birthday presents beneath. She happily opened them knowing that a month later there would be a new batch to unwrap. But we weren’t together for her last Christmas. Jess died on January 16, 2015. She was twenty-six.
These dates combine to make my holidays a time of sorrow and quiet memory, from Halloween (her favorite) through New Year’s Eve and on to my daughter’s memorial day. It can be a grim and cold time of year. “No one chooses the dark night; the dark night descends,” observes Barbara Brown Taylor. “The only way out is through it.”
This may be true, but in our modern age we often seek to stave off the darkness of winter. Cold’s first snap is met with garish celebrations on Halloween, followed by bustling Thanksgiving travel, a flurry of shopping, Christmas, and another gaudy holiday, New Year’s Eve. We have religious observations, to be sure, but for many in the twenty-first century, believers included, the time is more busy than solemn.
Such constant movement can be difficult for the bereaved. Oh, we enjoy time with friends and family. We know that there is indeed a time to laugh and a time to dance, as we read in Ecclesiastes. But here the ancient teacher surprises us. Amid the smiles and bustle, he suggests, there is also a time to weep and a time to mourn. We need quiet, calm, and reflection. Grief too is part of life.
This may be why over one third of the Psalter consists of songs of lament. Hebrew hymnists understood something that we may overlook in our modern world. Psychologist Elizabeth Lewis Hall says that lament constructively helps mourners deal with loss and pain, moving “from disorientation to new orientation.”
Psychotherapist Ashley Davis Bush takes this further with a startling comparison. She observes that in the Alcoholics Anonymous model, addicts never completely recover, even if they have not had a drink for decades. “In much the same way, a griever is recovering and healing, but is never fully recovered,” Davis Bush concludes. “The grieving process is life-long in that the griever will be forever touched and affected by his loss.”
Making time for small traditions, such as trimming a Christmas tree, has a measurably positive impact on mourners’ health, according to Mikael Rostila with Stockholm University. He may be right.
Rituals are our allies in sorrow. They help us appreciate what brief time we had with our loved ones while acknowledging the years we will face without them. Yet Christmas need not be crippling. Pause with me now before our tree. Do you see that battered ornament? Or my daughter’s childhood sipping cup nestled among the branches? I hang them each year. And look closer, there in the dark between glittering lights: an unbroken bough of hope.
This translation of Rückert’s “O Christmas Tree” is by David Bannon and first appeared in Songs on the Death of Children (Toplight, 2022).
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