My understanding of Blue Christmas has changed over the years.
Growing up, the only version of “Blue Christmas” I knew was the one that involved holding a wooden spoon up to my lips and crooning along to Elvis in front of a decorated Douglas Fir in my living room.
I’ll have a blue Christmas without you
I’ll be so blue just thinking about you
Decorations of red on a green Christmas tree
Won’t be the same, dear, if you’re not here with me
Cara Meredith
The melancholic holiday classic delves into themes of loneliness and heartache, his rockabilly ballad a tune that easily stays with you long after you’ve held his crooning close. As a child, I didn’t think there was a whole lot to the concept of Blue Christmas, other than the one the king sounded in his longing for love.
Decades later, I got to know a different side of the holiday season through various Blue Christmas and Longest Night services. A smattering of churches in different denominations — Baptist, Episcopal and Presbyterian, to name a few — embraced a tradition that originated in the hospice movement, in an effort to “acknowledge the darkness, and let it be dark.” Then, in the early 1990s, the tradition found its way into Western Christianity.
In all these many spaces, I began to acquaint myself with grief. For much of my life, too long it seems, I connected the holidays with pure merriment and cheer, sunshine and bliss, with a side of spiked eggnog, if I was so lucky.
“For much of my life, I connected the holidays with pure merriment and cheer, sunshine and bliss, with a side of spiked eggnog.”
But as life has a tendency to do, grief and loss moved into the neighborhood.
Sometimes, when I watched the slow and agonizing demise of Alzheimer’s and dementia to two of my grandparents, grief felt more anticipatory than normal. Sometimes, when a move from one state to another, there and back again, resulted in another round of upheaval and jagged new beginnings, grief reared its head in a show of disenfranchisement more so than of complication.
Whatever the grief, I had begun to feel it, deep in my bones — down into the reaches of my soul. I think that’s when I stumbled upon my first Blue Christmas service.
In Western Christian traditions, the services, which tend to happen on or around Winter Solstice (Dec. 21), seek to provide comfort, space and hope for those walking through their own longest night of the year. More often than not, the time gives way to sadness and makes “collective room for grief, even if just for an hour or so.”
Sharon Siler, executive director at Healing Place Center for Counseling and Spiritual Formation in Mechanicsburg, Va., says of the services, “When you are having a loss, a holiday really points that out — that there is an empty chair, an empty space … that someone who was with me is not going to be there with me again.” For her team, the service provides an opportunity for healing and hope, particularly for those who are experiencing loss during the holiday season.
Across the country at Westwood United Church of Christ in West Los Angeles, Kirsten Linford notes how in the services “members of the congregation buoy each other through difficult times. Giving voice to their deepest sadnesses allows them to lay down their burdens and look to something beyond grief or loss.” In this place, “while sorrow is real, the final word is joy.”
“I sing a chorus of broken hallelujahs.”
For a number of traditions, however, including Traditionalist Roman Catholics, the Lutheran Church and a smattering of Anglicans, Longest Night services tend to fall on the traditional feast day for St. Thomas the Apostle. It’s not too hard to imagine the “connections between St. Thomas’ struggle to believe in Jesus’ resurrection, the long nights just before Christmas and the struggle with darkness and grief faced by those living with loss.”
I suppose it’s the intersection with St. Thomas that tips me over the edge to continue to get to know darkness and gather around an emotion that is not always recognized or readily accepted — let alone cheered on or encouraged to embody in the holiday season. Here, a godly kind of grief can show up in the portals of faith, when that which I was once so sure about often feels iffy at best and utterly archaic at worst.
But here, another decade after I first started attending Blue Christmas services, I am not always so apt to center grief in curated places of order.
I sing a chorus of broken hallelujahs, which is often the point of these lament-filled services, but my song happens in more organic spaces where I am not prompted to grieve and then give way to hope. The tune happens under cold azure skies, a fire crackling before me, on a walk with a neighbor around a tidal lagoon, near the lights of the Christmas tree when stillness surrounds.
Elvis no longer croons in the background, but I suppose the sentiment remains: Loneliness and heartache and longing are mine, and maybe his too, as I make time and space for that holy thing called hope.
Cara Meredith was raised in the American Baptist Churches in the USA but currently worships as an Episcopalian. She is a freelance author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation.
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