Recently, I found myself chatting over lunch with a young couple who plan to be married this year. The young woman sighed and commented that her family was rather impatient with her about her Christmas plans this year, disappointed that she would be dividing her time between their house and her intended’s house. I sounded like a wise old owl from inside my head as my lips uttered the words, “Well, one of the main things you can count on in this life is change.” I assured her that her parents knew this fact intellectually, and emotionally, they would eventually get used to it and celebrate the growth of their nuclear family to include a wonderful son -in-law.

The father of my best college friend advised us at their family table once that change is one of the few constants in life. I remember feeling sad when I heard those words falling on my 20-year-old ears, thinking how much I liked my life the way it was. I didn’t want anyone to move away, or die, or get sick; I didn’t want to lose touch with the great friends I’d made; I wanted all the wonderful things that were already in place to stay the same. Of course, it wouldn’t have bothered me at all for any of the negative details of my life to change! Bring on the change, when it involves erasing a negative!

Christmastime is a time when we notice what’s changed in our lives since the previous year, or since many years ago. My grandmother, who lived to be 96, made a habit of pointing out who was missing on holidays, each year a family member had died. The year her husband and my other grandmother died within ten days of each other, she opined, “We’ve got two empty chairs this year.” I groaned inside my 13-year-old head as she said it, wishing she could have just kept that thought to herself, as if not mentioning the two empty chairs would keep everyone from thinking about it. She was just voicing our sense of loss. She would remain the only grandparent, representing her generation alone for another decade around that same table.

Christmas was different that year. And it seems like the next Christmas was a little different too. Come to think of it, the FOLLOWING Christmas was different from the one previous to it. In fact, I can’t think of two Christmases that were exactly the same. Every year, it seems like there was someone who had moved away, or a new person in our lives who had moved closer. Sometimes, there was a chair set for a new family friend, or a boyfriend, or a new son-in- law, even. But somehow, the chairs would be rearranged eventually and less or more china was set out and the rituals took a slightly different schedule each time.

If we count on things not to change, we set ourselves up for disappointment. Life is so precious and fragile that there are no guarantees. I’ve come to look around the Christmas dinner table, or the crowd on the floor around the tree, or even the sanctuary on the 24th, and look not for the empty spots, but instead for the faces there, and to be grateful for them. It’s taken a long time to figure out that it’s what I’m supposed to do, but I think I’m supposed to give thanks for the faces that come back to the circle, and to welcome the new ones that appear, and to enjoy every last drop of the time we have together, just as we enjoy the last drop of the juiciness of the oranges we find in our stockings on Christmas morning.