Sarah Reinhard lives in Ohio on a small farm with her husband, two children, and various pets and animals. You can read more of her writing at snoringscholar.com. We had the pleasure of spending a wonderful evening with her family last summer.
Today she brings us the third of her special Advent series on CatholicMom.com , entitled,
An Ongoing Christmas Memory .
Eight or nine years ago I attended my first midnight Christmas Mass. I was with my boyfriend, a guy who seemed too good to be true.
I had been attending Mass with them for some time, but nothing prepared me for that Christmas Mass. I had smelled incense, heard choirs, and participated in the liturgy before. I wasn’t exactly an old pro, but I was learning.
In those days, my bedtime was far later than it is now, and so it wasn’t even hard to stay up until midnight to attend.
To see our small church crowded — standing room only — in the middle of the night; to hear the choir pealing out hymns in a way they never did on Sundays; to see the extra candles, the extra servers, the extra decorations — all of this burned it into my memory.
I’m sure I cried at that first midnight Mass, when we rejoiced about the birth of our Savior. I felt Him come to me, somehow, at that Mass. Maybe it was in the wonder I felt, for what felt like the first time in years. Maybe it was in the sudden dropping of my cynicism and my shell of aloofness, in the surprise of the beauty of the Mass. Maybe it was the realization of what Christmas really is.
All of a sudden, my years of hating Christmas seemed to melt away. I saw that what I hated wasn’t really Christmas. I began to realize that Christmas isn’t the shopping and the juggling and the family politics.
Christmas is a birth.
I’m a mother now, and I look back on that first Christmas Mass — celebrated in the middle of a cold winter night — with continuing appreciation.
The magic of Christmas happens, for me, in the Eucharist, in the Baby whose birth continues to change my life and make me better. I feel the wonder of life around me, amid the music and the incense and the dark night. I remember giving birth and I remember being a child, believing that Christmas was special.
And now, thanks to a memory that I try to relive every year, I have found the true magic of Christmas.
Last year, Sarah Reinhard contributed four wonderful articles to the Catholic New Media Advent Calendar: on December 2, December 8, December 15, and January 1 .
Join us tomorrow and every day until December 26 for more reflections produced by great Catholic New Media personalities.
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