The SantaBlog Series, Day 19. (What Still Remains)

THE SANTABLOG SERIES

DAY 19

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Take a breath before you start.

The Ones Who Aren’t Here This Christmas

Christmas has a way of reminding you who is missing.
Not loudly or all at once.
Just in small, unexpected moments.
An empty chair you don’t look at for too long.
A joke you almost repeat before remembering who used to laugh at it.
A habit you still expect to see, even though you know better.
For me, Christmas always brings my grandad back into the room. Not in a painful way anymore, more like a quiet presence. He has been gone a few years now, long enough for the sharp edges to soften. Long enough for the memories to feel warm rather than heavy.
He belongs to Christmas in my mind. The older kind of Christmas. Slower. Calmer. Less fuss. The sort that didn’t need much to feel complete. Just being there was enough.
I catch myself thinking about him when the season slows down. When the noise drops for a moment and the lights are on but nothing else is happening. Those are the moments he slips into. Not as sadness. Just as absence you notice because it used to be filled.
That kind of missing changes over time. It becomes familiar. You learn how to carry it.
What feels different this year is the newer absence.
Losing a friend changes Christmas in a way you don’t expect. Especially when it is still fresh. When the year hasn’t had time to rearrange itself yet. When your brain still reaches for them out of habit, before reality catches up.
There is something cruel about how Christmas keeps going regardless. The songs still play. The adverts still roll. People still ask if you’re ready for it all. Meanwhile, part of you is still somewhere else entirely, stuck in a moment that doesn’t feel like it belongs in December at all.
Grief doesn’t arrive dressed for the season. It doesn’t match the lights or the cheer. It just sits there, quietly reminding you that time moves on whether you are ready or not.
And yet, Christmas does something strange too.
It gives you permission to remember.
Not in a formal, ceremonial way. Just in passing. A thought. A smile that catches you off guard. A moment where you realise how much someone mattered because they still show up in your mind without being invited.
That is what both losses share for me now. Different weights. Different distances in time. But the same presence when things slow down.
Christmas has never really been about who is here. It is about who still matters.
The people we carry into rooms they never stood in. The ones we think about when the house is quiet. The ones who shaped us enough that a season can still call them back.
So if this Christmas feels a little different for you, if it feels heavier or quieter or slightly off balance, you are not doing it wrong.
You are remembering.
And that, inconvenient and painful as it can be, is also a form of love.

When the Season Keeps Moving Without Them

What makes Christmas difficult is not the big moments.
It is the ordinary ones.
The world does not pause out of respect. The calendar does not hesitate. December arrives exactly when it always has, even when someone important did not make it there with you.
You notice it in places you didn’t expect. Standing in a queue, half listening to a song you’ve heard every year of your life. Wrapping something small and realising who you used to show it to first. Laughing, then stopping, because a particular voice is missing from the sound of it.
Christmas insists on repetition. The same smells. The same phrases. The same routines. When someone is gone, those repetitions stop comforting you at first. They highlight the gap instead. They trace the outline of absence in ways you can’t quite ignore.
This is especially true when the loss is still fresh.
Time hasn’t had a chance to rearrange itself yet. Your mind still reaches for people out of habit. You still expect messages that don’t come. You still think, for a split second, that you should tell them something before remembering why you can’t.
Christmas magnifies that feeling because it asks you to remember how things were while participating in how things are now. It places past and present side by side and expects you to move between them gracefully.
There’s a quiet pressure to be okay. To be festive. To keep pace with the season. Most people do, not because they feel fine, but because explaining the truth feels heavier than carrying it silently.
That truth is simple and uncomfortable. Life does not stop for grief. It keeps moving, sometimes too fast, and leaves you trying to find your footing as you go.
Christmas doesn’t slow down.
It arrives anyway.

The Way Loss Rearranges Your Thoughts

Loss does not just remove someone from your life. It quietly reshapes the way your mind works.
You start thinking in loops rather than lines. Moments from years ago surface without warning. Things you thought you had forgotten suddenly feel close enough to touch. Not because you are stuck, but because your brain is still learning where to place someone who no longer fits into the present.
Christmas makes that process louder.
You find yourself mentally checking in with people who aren’t there. Wondering what they would have said about something small. How they would have reacted to a familiar moment. You don’t do it on purpose. It just happens, like muscle memory. Your mind still reaches for them because it always has.
There is a strange discomfort in realising how much of your thinking was shaped around someone else. How many routines included them without you ever noticing. When they’re gone, the routines stay, but the anchor is missing. That’s when the thinking starts to drift.
Fresh loss carries a different weight. It hasn’t settled yet. It doesn’t know where to sit. One minute you’re steady, the next you’re caught off guard by something as small as a smell or a phrase. Christmas throws more of those moments at you than most times of year.
There’s also a quiet guilt that creeps in. The kind people don’t talk about much. Feeling okay for a moment and then wondering if you’re allowed to. Laughing and then immediately remembering who isn’t there to hear it. Joy and grief start sharing space, awkwardly at first, like strangers learning how to exist in the same room.
This is where grief often gets misunderstood. People expect it to be loud or obvious. But most of the time, it’s internal. It’s thought based. It’s the way your mind keeps adjusting to a reality it didn’t ask for.
Christmas doesn’t give you answers. It doesn’t offer closure. What it does is reveal how deeply people are woven into us. How someone can be gone and still influence how you think, how you feel, how you move through a season you’ve known your whole life.
That influence doesn’t fade quickly. And maybe it’s not supposed to.
And it’s worth saying this isn’t limited to losing someone to the final curtain.
Christmas also brings back the people who are still out there somewhere in the world, just no longer in your life. Friends who drifted. Relationships that ended quietly. People you once spoke to every day who now exist only as a thought you don’t follow too far.
They show up too.
Not as grief in the traditional sense, but as a softer ache. A wondering. A version of them that lives in a specific time of your life, frozen there, untouched by whatever they became after you stopped sharing days.
You remember who you were when they were around. How certain conversations felt. How easy some moments were. And Christmas, with all its memory and repetition, has a habit of reopening those mental rooms you thought you’d closed for good.
It’s strange how absence works. Someone can be alive, breathing, living a full life somewhere else, and still feel just as unreachable in December as someone who is gone entirely. Different losses, different weights, but the same quiet sense of something no longer fitting the way it once did.
Christmas doesn’t discriminate between them. It brings everyone back. The dead. The distant. The almost forgotten. Anyone who shaped you enough to leave a mark.
And maybe that’s why the season feels heavier for some people than others. It’s not just about who isn’t here anymore. It’s about how many versions of our lives we carry with us without realising it.

What Still Remains

The strange thing about Christmas is that it eventually teaches you this.
People don’t vanish just because they’re no longer here in the way they once were.
They change shape.
They become habits you still carry. Phrases you still use without thinking. Opinions that still pop into your head when you’re deciding something small. They turn up in the way you make a cup of tea, the way you tell a story, the way you react to a moment before you even realise why.
Those who are gone don’t sit outside your life. They live inside it. They live through you and they become a part of you.
And Christmas, for all its noise and repetition, has a habit of revealing that gently. When the house is quiet. When the lights are on but nothing else is happening. When you’re not performing the season for anyone, just existing in it.
That’s when you realise they’re still with you, not as absence, but as influence.
The same goes for the people who are still out there somewhere. The ones who no longer share your days but once shaped who you were. They didn’t disappear either. They helped build a version of you that still exists. Even if the relationship ended. Even if life pulled you in different directions. Even if you haven’t spoken in years.
They mattered. And because they mattered, they remain.
This is the part of Christmas we don’t talk about enough. Not the grief. Not the ache. But the continuity. The way love doesn’t actually stop just because circumstances change. It settles. It softens. It finds quieter ways to exist.
So if this Christmas feels heavier than usual, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means you’ve lived. It means you’ve cared. It means people passed through your life and left it changed for the better.
That’s not something to rush away.
Christmas doesn’t ask you to forget. It doesn’t demand you move on. It simply reminds you that connection doesn’t end at absence. It adapts. It becomes memory, habit, instinct, and quiet company.
And sometimes, in the still moments, that’s enough.
Not everything has to be loud to be real.
Not everyone has to be present to still belong.
If nothing else, Christmas teaches us that.

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