Christmas is not for everyone
Christmas is not for everyone. It is not for the incomplete.
I have known this since I was 7 years old and I learned it the hard way. While other children count down to the day with eager anticipation, I count the years, months, and hours since I last held my father close.
There are multiple oceans that I don’t know the names of that separate me from my father and I have made multiple attempts to swim through that gap every December, but failing almost immediately after six flutter kicks in. I surface gasping, not because the water is deep, but because absence has its own gravity—heavy, unforgiving, and constant. Each year, Christmas convinces me that the distance might finally be smaller, that the tide might be kinder this time. But hope is a dangerous thing to carry into cold water. It urges me forward even when my lungs already know the ending.
Growing up, the only prayer I solemnly held on to was the one where the distance between my father and me would shrink even if it is just for one day—for my sister’s birthday, or for my graduation, or for Mother’s Day, or above all, for Christmas.
I would imagine the day he would come home for the holidays, suitcases in hand, stories of foreign ports spilling from his mouth, and our laughter echoing through our little home. It barely happened. And yet, until now, I am still hoping it would. For I am taught that December is a season of miracles and of crossing boundaries of time and borders. But for children who have grown into yearning adults, Christmas is also a reminder that some wishes would take years to come true, and some oceans are too wide to swim, no matter how many flutter kicks in.
And so, Christmas became less about presents or lights and more about learning how to find happiness despite our family being incomplete. And honestly speaking, it is a difficult thing to do. Not when you are surrounded by complete families and it seems to them that the magic you have known when you were a kid is still so easily found just because there is no missing family member in the dining room. As if happiness is not a present, but a natural force that can be found anywhere.
But there is nothing I can do about it.
December is not just a celebration for children of OFW parents like me. It is a rehearsal in patience, a quiet practice of carrying the weight of longing without complaint. Because in the end, I know my father is also carrying the same burden of loneliness on his shoulders. Maybe a hundred times more difficult for him who celebrates the holidays alone and in a foreign country. He wakes up to mornings that feel no different from any other workday, I wake up to a house that learns to be whole without him. While we gather around tables back home, his celebration is measured in brief calls, pixelated smiles, and the careful timing of time zones. He sends his love through remittances and reassurances, through words that say he is fine even when he barely is. He learns to swallow homesickness in silence, and I learn to grow up faster than I should.
And so Christmas becomes a shared sacrifice—ours marked by absence, his by endurance—bound together by the quiet hope that someday, the waiting will end and the holiday will no longer have to be practiced from afar.
Still, I smile when December arrives. There is courage in pretending, in blending into happiness that isn’t fully yours.
As I grew older, I realized that Christmas is not cruel by intention. It simply reflects. It magnifies what is already there. For those who are whole, it glows. For those who are fractured, it sharpens the edges. And so the season taught me awareness long before it taught me joy. It taught me that love can exist alongside longing, that gratitude and grief are not opposites but companions. I learned that it is possible to be thankful and aching at the same time, to love the holidays and still dread their arrival.
Perhaps Christmas is not for the incomplete in the way stories promise it should be. But it is for endurance. It is for learning how to stretch love across distances it was never meant to survive. It is for children who grow up memorizing time zones, who learn affection through screens, who understand sacrifice before they understand abundance. It is for parents who miss birthdays and milestones so their children can eat, study, and dream. In this way, Christmas becomes less of a miracle and more of a testament.
That is the quiet truth I have been circling all along—that being incomplete does not mean being unloved. It means loving in ways that are harder, heavier, and often unseen. It means celebrating through absence and hoping even when history advises otherwise.
Christmas may not have been made for families like mine, but we have learned how to survive it anyway. And every December that I endure, I realize that surviving, too, is a kind of miracle—one practiced patiently, year after year, across oceans that still refuse to shrink.
December is not for the incomplete, but for those who carry absence like a second heart.
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Bheatrize Stephanie F. Tomongha, 18, is a yearning daughter.
