Christmas

A year ago I spent Christmas with my husband in Newtown, Connecticut, as he covered the community in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shootings. Such grave loss was a reminder to be grateful for what is good in a time that should be about happiness and celebration, not hate and condolence. Here is the blog I wrote a year ago today on the experience: 

When I envisioned spending Christmas accompanying my photojournalist husband on his holiday photo assignments, I envisioned I would be going to something like last year's assignment when he covered a grandfather surprising his family by arriving on Christmas in a Santa Claus suit when his normal custom is to spend the day of mistletoe in Florida. I did not envision I would walk down a slush-filled street as a Desi family walked up the slope with the mother holding a bouquet of flowers in her arms and each of her three children holding a stuffed animal. They were bound to add their own material act of witness to the hundreds of other such acts making up one of the memorials to the schoolchildren and the school administrators murdered 11 days ago in Newtown, Connecticut.  Newtown is like many other New England towns made pretty by bubbling brooks, steep hillsides impregnated with impressive boulders, and with handsome stone and clapboard churches. Just as there was across many towns in New England, there was a white Christmas today. But the snow fell on the stuffed animals, poems and Christmas ornaments of several memorials, several acts of mourning stations. Jason's assignment was to go with a reporter from Texas to document how people were spending the holiday in this traumatized town. Last night's snowfall was melting. The scent of vanilla was on the air from the candles burning, and there were sparrows chirping in the trees overhead. The formal dress shop--which one of the memorials stretches in front of--changed the gowns displayed in its windows to green-and-white: the colors of the school where the shooting happened. Across from the memorial at the drive up to the school is an old graveyard where the last dead were buried in 1942. Does it make it better to know that sorrow is not a new thing, that generations before have always been so burdened? Another memorial is at the village center, spread across a bridge. Someone has written in spraypaint under the bridge: "We have everything and we have nothing. Small and unstable we self-destruct. We are sleeping sheep and there are wolves among us." I prefer to focus on the signs posted, elsewhere and everywhere, in the town: "We are Sandy Hook. We choose love." Today, in memoriam, I choose love.