Lost in Legacy

I looked in old corners, up dusty stairwells, in forgotten closets, and in trunks of old memorabilia. Christmas eluded me this year. I could hear the soft echoes of Gramma Wright's laughter, and the cry of alarm when my dog's wet nose touched her hand. I could smell the gingerbread cake wafting through the air as Nat King Cole crooned "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire". I could even catch filmy glimpses of my father crouching by the fireplace, stoking the embers with an iron fire poker, and my mother hiding her stress behind a thin smile as she wished someone would help her in the kitchen. None of us dared to, of course, because she had a particular way of doing things, and one of those ways was being irritated no one helped her and irritated if they did.

I reached out to grab hold of a Christmas tree in my dreams, with its multicolored lights and plastic-canvas ornaments woven with yarn and turned into 3D rocking horses by my great-uncle. He died of emphysema after years of smoking and drinking. He found Jesus in his old age and took up hook-crocheting these ornaments for family as an apology for his past.

I tried to find the old LP records with their cardboard covers. The ones my mother had tucked into a wooden magazine rack to be pulled out at Christmas. The Carpenters, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland . . . all the classic ones. I couldn't find the records. I don't even know where the behemoth record player plus entertainment center had vanished to. You know the kind? The big cabinets with lids that lifted to reveal the record player inside, and if you didn't hook the lid's hinges just right it would slam down on your fingers?

I saw my brother in the chair in the corner of the living room. He was the epitome of a thirteen-year-old bored stiff at Christmas, and he tried to occupy himself by putting together a Norman Rockwell jigsaw puzzle while snacking on carrot sticks. Carrot sticks, because my mother said cookies and the like were meant to be eaten in moderation and only after dinner. She is why I have good teeth today.

I was still searching for Christmas when I felt the warm ghost of a touch on my knee. I saw myself sitting by Gramma Wright on the stairs, the fire from the fireplace drifting toward us, the orange calico shag carpet beneath us padding our bottoms. She had taken refuge on the stairs, my black Labrador posting herself at the bottom with a happy smile that threatened to scare my grandmother to no end.

I felt Gramma's hand pat my knee. She was round, and soft, and plump, and her hair was white and permed, and her glasses were horn-rimmed, and her teeth were coffee-stained, and her cheeks were rosy, and her bosom was bedecked in a crocheted sweater and a string of beads with colored birds.

"Some day, Christmas will seem far away," she said to me. "It will be a distant memory, and the ones you love will dance shadows across your heart. When you grow up, when I have been gone for decades, you will try to find Christmas. You will look in old corners, up dusty stairwells, in forgotten closets, and in trunks of old memorabilia. But Christmas won't be there. You will close your eyes tight and strain to remember, to time travel, to return to a moment when Christmas was so normal and so unaffected that the darkness of the world was imaginary and all that was were the good things. The hallowed things. The precious things. But you won't find Christmas there, either."

I felt her pat my knee once more. I looked down at my knee, but her hand wasn't there. Just its warmth. A vapor of what had been. Once. A lifetime ago.

"You will finally remember to look for Christmas in your heart. And you will find it there. Because your heart takes photographs and records silent movies. Because the miracle of Christ gently carves His legacy there. You cannot touch it, or grasp it, or hold it, or capture it. Legacy drifts as a ghost, if you will. But it is there, and without it, you wouldn't be you. I wouldn't be me. Without legacy, we wouldn't remember a manger, a Savior, or that first Christmas star."

Gramma Wright smiled then—her soft, Welsh-born smile of well-bred intention and etiquette. "Without legacy, there would be no faith to bind our hearts forever, with the promise of the eternal. And that, my dear, is where Christmas is found. In legacy. In eternity. In God's promise of what is still to come."

Follow Cheryl's Journey:

Cheryl Grey Bostrom

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Sara Brunsvold

GIVEAWAY: Enter to win 1 of 3 Christmas gift baskets from: Sara Brunsvold, Cheryl Grey Bostrom, or Jaime Jo Wright!  12/1-15/2025

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From Sara: A tin of gourmet Christmas cookies paired with a copy of my third novel, The Atlas of Untold Stories.

From Cheryl: Cheryl's View from Goose Ridge devotional, and her 3 novels.

From Jaime: Coffee sampler, a copy of her book "Night Falls on Predicament Avenue" and a vintage photograph bookmark to remember legacies.

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