The Christmas I Didn’t Order—and the One I Needed

It’s Christmas Day, and it is unfolding in a way I didn’t plan.

A few days ago, my daughter, her husband, and their delicious 13-month-old arrived, and almost immediately we fell into a rhythm—the sacred choreography of naps and bedtime, bottles and meals. The calendar was thoughtfully modest: one outing a day, just enough adventure to feel festive, never enough to tip into exhaustion. It was a grandparent’s version of a Hallmark holiday—warm, intentional, lovingly paced.

And then life did what it always does.

It changed the script.

By yesterday, Christmas Eve, the plans had quietly slipped away. Colds arrived. Coughs followed. Sore throats replaced carols. Bright eyes dulled, and “bushy-tailed” was not a phrase that applied to anyone in the house. If Santa was hoping for cookies, milk, and a thank-you note, he missed out entirely. Not because we didn’t care—but because caring looked different this year. Caring looked like cradling and soothing whispers, warm broth and repeated cleaning and disinfecting of everything we could think of.

Whenever something unexpected arrives—especially when it arrives wrapped in discomfort—it has a way of sharpening our awareness of everything that is still good. That, I realized, was the true gift of this Christmas.

The fever broke.
Appetites returned.
There were moments of Christmas music, uninterrupted.

And though I didn’t make it to Christmas Mass, I understood something deeply: church does not always look like an altar or the sound of familiar hymns. Sometimes it looks like a living room turned quiet infirmary. Sometimes it sounds like prayers inside your head and gratefulness that things aren’t worse. And inside it all lives the same gratitude, the same reverence, the same recognition of God’s presence moving gently through our lives.

As we cared for our family’s small baby and watched him mend, I couldn’t help but think of another child, long ago. How impossibly precious Jesus must have been to a fourteen-year-old girl and her husband—no proper crib, no perfect swaddle, no sense of readiness for what had been entrusted to them. Just love. Just vigilance. Just trust from the moment she first said, “His will be done.”

This was not the Christmas I expected. But as everything with God, it was rich, and it was real. And it was enough.

And it was enough.