Every Holiday

As I sit with my morning coffee to write this, I can’t help but watch the autumn leaves shiver outside as the first wave of winter hits Oklahoma. I remember feeling frustrated as a child because winters here were always frigid and often icy but rarely provided much snow for sledding or building snowmen. If today is any indication for the coming winter, it seems that not much has changed. Despite the weather, the holiday season has always been my favorite time of year. The town decor quickly turns red, white, and green. TV commercials begin to add sleigh bells to their jingles (no pun intended), and the thought of home never sounds so good. It is the most wonderful time of the year after all. 

The winter of 2014, however, was one like I had never experienced. There was the normal hustle and bustle in my small hometown of Claremore, and the weather turned bitter cold without a trace of snow as November swept into December seemingly overnight. The difference that year had little to do with the season itself though. Yet somehow, it forever managed to change the holidays for me. My mother was always the one who made our home look, smell, and feel like Christmas. As soon as Thanksgiving turned its page, mom had changed everything from the music to the napkins in order to create a cozy, festive wonderland in the Shomaker home. But not that year. In mid-December, I found myself rummaging through old decor in my best attempt to dress the house in mom’s stead. The rest of the family was at St. Francis Hospital in Tulsa where mom was battling Leukemia. She had been diagnosed 2 years earlier but had been in remission for quite some time thanks to a successful bone marrow transplant. It was late that November that she was told that the leukemia had returned and she would resume the fight.

There is a lot that goes into this story that I cannot summarize, even in this mini-novel that you are currently reading. Suffice it to say that while I understand holidays are typically a joyous time, I also know that they can hold equal parts joy and pain. They can hold both good and bad memories. Cavern Company wanted to write a song that captures the essence of this; a song that pulls the curtain on sorrow but also offers hope like a beacon in bleak darkness. I wish I could tell you that this story has a happy ending. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always give us the storybook ending we dream of as kids. On January 3rd, 2015 my mother breathed her last breath on this earth. We spent her last Christmas in a small hospital room surrounded by family complete with simple gifts and a lot of joy. My mother never made it home to see the decorations I had set up in her absence that year, and there are a number of things I wish I could go back and do differently. Every holiday since has been a reminder of this for me. Although I’m certain that the Christmas season will never be the same, I’m grateful for the memories that survive and, even in a time of sorrow and heartache, for the life that new memories and new relationships give us. 

- Zach

“I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process.”

- C.S. Lewis - A Grief Observed

Listen below

Listen to Every Holiday at the link below!