When one has love and Christmas in their hearts, it matters not what lays beneath the tree. It matters less whether one is homeless, jobless, destitute or whether one enjoys a material lifestyle beyond average means. What really matters is the fact that someone you love is not with you!
Love never knows its own depth until the point of separation. Sadly, as is often reflected in extreme pain caused by terminal illness, there can be as much love in 'letting go' of a loved one as in 'holding on'. On the other hand, when one's love is fighting abroad in the Armed Service or on some foreign battlefield and cannot be with you for a birthday, an anniversary or on Christmas Day; such absence merely makes the love you feel when you are together far deeper when apart.
Separation sadness and sense of loss can also occur when it is deliberately designed by one of the two people in a failed relationship. Just because your partner stopped loving you doesn't necessarily mean that you have stopped loving them. This is an important time in your life to recognise that the 'breaking up' of your relationship shouldn't necessarily lead to the 'breaking down' of your emotional self.
Our hearts also go out to the many of thousands of young people who ran away from home at a time of emotional difficulty and after the passage of significant time away from home without contact being initiated by themselves, they now feel unable to make that phone call to mum or dad, however much unhappiness and deprivation they are experiencing.
On such sad occasions of separation, it can be love song, poem, soulful tune or even observing some trivial incident of another that is capable of unleashing the dam of tears that time has held back for so long.
So, this Christmas, please spare a thought for all those people whom, for whatever reason, find themselves unable to be with the person they most love. and miss enormously. For many of them it will be 'a blue, blue Christmas'.
Love and peace. Bill xxx