We started unpacking the Christmas ornaments last night, gently lifting these carefully wrapped items from the plastic bins where we tucked them away 11 months ago. Some lay well-preserved in their original Hallmark boxes, while others sat packed in crinkled paper, yellowed with years. With each one came a memory, a compilation of our lives and of Christmases past that the four of us relived with stories and reminiscences.
As we laughed together about the girls’ finger-painted preschool ornaments, Elizabeth lifted a small package labeled “Lilly’s angel” and handed it to me. At once, nostalgia carried me back to the weeks before Christmas the year I was 10.
My grandmother, who we all called “Lilly,” had come for dinner one evening just before Thanksgiving. A widow, she often drove up to visit us for a day or two. Walking past the kitchen, I overheard her tell my mother that no, she did not want to wait until Christmas. She wanted to give them to us now. Childhood excitement piqued, and I ran to find my brothers. I was sure she was talking about us! What did she have? A Christmas present? Already?
When Lilly appeared, she was carrying three little packages wrapped in plain tissue paper, my mother standing beside her, slightly shaking her head. They didn’t look like Christmas gifts, I thought, but Lilly said she had made them especially for us at a ceramics class and to open them—carefully.
David, at four, went first, unwrapping a smiling Santa ornament with a thin string dangling from the top. Michael followed, revealing a toy soldier standing at attention in a blue and red uniform. Then it was my turn. Unfolding the paper, I removed a graceful angel with a dress of pale pink, flowing golden hair, and bronze wings. In her outstretched arms, she held a tiny trumpet, ready to proclaim the good news.
In the palm of my hand, I held her gently, this Christmas gift that had come so early for reasons I did not understand. My mother said she’d hold them all until Lilly came back next month to decorate with us. But Lilly never came back. She died in her sleep that night, having just given her grandchildren a final, most precious gift, handmade with love in honor of our savior’s birth.
In the days and weeks that followed, the family wondered why Lilly insisted on giving us her gifts that day. Did she have a sense the Lord would be calling her? Did she know she would not be here to open presents on December 25? Like my ornament, she became our guardian angel, filling us with her presence even after she was gone. Just as I could not understand receiving a Christmas gift in mid-November, it was not for us to understand the Lord’s choice to take her when he did. All I could do was gaze at Lilly’s angel and feel my grandmother with me.
After holding her gently in the palm of my hand, just as I did when I was ten, I take a hook and place my angel among the pine branches, near an “our first Christmas” ornament and the girls’ long ago preschool creations. I straighten it so the trumpet faces outward and imagine it proclaiming, as the heavenly angels do: “Christ is born in Bethlehem!”