Christmas was a non-event for me last year. There were no long anticipations, no fuzzy feelings, and the dancing sugar plums were out on strike. I can’t explain why. I have no idea what took place to dampen my usual Christmas euphoria, but dampened it was, in fact it was downright soggy.

This year, for equally unanswerable reasons, I’ve been oozing the Christmas spirit all over the place. The Christmas music has been on constantly since Halloween night. I’ve been to “The Nativity Story” twice. We got our tree up a week early. And, we were the first house on the street to put up our outside decorations – thanks to Sheila. We even beat the guy down the street who is so obsessive about decorating that this year he has annexed his neighbour’s yard to expand his Christmas empire.

Last Christmas’ blahs, and this Christmas’ ahs only serve to show that true Christmas spirit can’t be manufactured. Actually let me take that back, because, really, what is true Christmas spirit anyway? Christmas is many things. It’s joy and sorrow, magic and tragic. It’s sweet memories, deep longings and heart-felt loss. Let’s face it, Christmas is an emotional amplifier that blares our heart’s playlist from Christmas’ past and present, both good and bad, glad and sad. So whose to say what a good Christmas is, at least emotionally. I think most Christmases are a mixture of emotions.

Having said that, I would like to suggest that with the right kind of attitude we can walk through the Christmas minefield relatively (note the double meaning here) unscathed.

At the top of this piece we have one of my favourite shots taken this fall. I love this shot of a milkweed plant. It is soft and delicate and fragile in it’s beauty. I have a hard time even believing that I took it, but take it I did. This shot transmits a sense of beauty and calmness, but what you don’t know is that I took it in a downright ugly place. It was on the side of a hill, next to a busy street, almost under a train bridge, surrounded by noise and traffic and garbage. In fact in the midst of taking this shot, one guy walked up to me and wanted to know if I was into taking “girly” shots. Let’s just say the whole atmosphere was quite different from the results you see before you now.

Now, I share this with you, just to let you know that what I am most proud of about this shot is that I found beauty surrounded by ugliness. On the side of this busy road, near the noise of the trains, surrounded by the concrete, asphalt and garbage, I captured beauty that no one else saw or was even, quite frankly, looking for. So with that in mind, I am wishing you a Milkweed Christmas.

What is a Milkweed Christmas, you ask? It’s simply this, it’s a Christmas focused on looking for, and finding beauty in the midst of ugliness. Your Christmas might be full of ugly baggage. No one can argue that the way we celebrate Christmas is often ugly and crass. The Christmas Spirit can be drowned out by the traffic of commercialism. Sometimes there is a lot of garbage lying around the Christmas Season. Bad memories, missing loved ones, greater stresses, longings, expectations and sadness. But, no matter how busy, or bad, or ugly Christmas gets, you owe it to yourself to look past the distractions and find the beauty. It’s there, really it is.

I guarantee that it’s there because the message of Christmas is that God loved us enough to come to this world and plant beauty and hope where there was only ugliness and despair. Christmas is about God coming to experience the worst this life has to offer and in so doing, He gave us the hope of a life we could never have dreamed possible. Christmas is a beachhead of beauty planted in a world longing for change. So find the beauty. It’s there. Better yet, make some of your own and share it with someone else!

Merry Milkweed Christmas everyone!

PS. If you would like to read more of my Christmas pieces as well as some excellent Christmas musings from my friends and other contributers, don’t forget to check out Graceland’s Christmas Celebration