Advent Day 7: A Single Dad at Christmas

I write a lot about being a single dad. I also write a lot about being a single dad at Christmas. Being a dad is about the only thing I’ve been consistently good at. The rest has had its peaks and valleys. When my daughter was little, Christmas was easier. I guess that’s true of all kids. They are so overwhelmed by the lights, and sounds, and stories and anticipation, that they care little about what’s actually under the tree.

Then they get a bit older and they start getting specific and they start remembering the light displays we saw last year and they want to see something knew.

But they still become mesmerized by the wonder, and they still get excited, and they still sing the carols and open the doors of the little cardboard Advent calendar, and they still sit on Santa’s knee and whisper their wish-list into his ear.

Then the day comes when they hit the pause button in their believing. They know the “truth” about Santa, and they are a little too cool to sing carols in the car while we travel, and they don’t find intrigue in what lies behind the doors of the Advent calendar.

I remember that Christmas. My daughter was ten, and I was homeless. She found out I was sleeping in my car about a month before Christmas and she was worried about me. I asked her if she wanted to get the Advent calendars again and she said, “Not this year.” Later I would find out that it was because I no longer had a kitchen counter and she didn’t know where I’d keep it. (That’s where we always placed it) She also informed me that her cousins had told her all about Santa, and a Christmas that was already damaged and taking on water, bottomed out on the rocks right then and there.

That was Christmas 2009. Like I did so often during the six years I battled back from homelessness, I wrote my way out of the pain and sadness that I was feeling. I wrote an Advent series on my blog back then, the stories reflected where I was at the time. My little girl was not so little now and the wonderful traditions we celebrated were gone forever. I always knew she’d figure Santa out…all kids do. But I’d hoped that we would always have the Advent calendar.

The Advent helps us break down the Christmas season from one enormous, glorious, history changing event, to a month of observance, reminders, traditions. It slows down each day as we pause to reflect on the scene behind each door. For me, it lives up to its meaning by building the anticipation of Christ’s coming on that morning in Bethlehem.

It extends Christmas into a month-long time of reflection.

Being a single dad at Christmas changes with the times. I have to adapt each year to whether she’ll be with me, where she is emotionally, and where she is in her celebration of the season. And sometimes –like this year—I have to adjust to not being with her at all on Christmas.

Her mom is not a Christmas person and Daisy has typically desired to spend the holiday with me because I am just the opposite. In my world, there aren’t quite enough lights, not enough Christmas music on the radio, and you can’t watch “Charlie Brown Christmas” too frequently. My daughter is cut from that cloth and would prefer to celebrate and decorate until she plopped over from fatigue. But she also misses her mom, or at least what she wishes she had with her mom. So, this year she is going to Tennessee while I go to Philadelphia to be with family.

That’s the toughest part of being a single dad at Christmas. It’s not being alone, because I’ll have family and friends and won’t spend very much time at all by myself. It’s being without her. She’s all the immediate family I have left, and I feel an emptiness inside when I spend special moments without her.

The day will come when she marries and has children and becomes a believer in Christmas again. There is something about being a parent at Christmas that makes you also a child at Christmas. The wonder in their eyes becomes your wonder all over again, and even though you know you’re “Santa,” you still wonder what he brought your children each year and you’re almost surprised. Each time you tell a Christmas story to your child, you become a child again yourself. 

So, I wait for those days to begin. Daisy is only 19 and has goals that don’t include children anytime soon, but one day I’ll be the grandad coming to visit, and I’ll become a believer yet again, as my child gets caught up in the same wonder I was when she was little. Until then, this year, I’ll go it alone.