Heading home for Christmas

Rachel and I are leaving for Pennsylvania in the morning.

Honestly, I have some mixed feelings. I'm very much looking forward to seeing my family, my pets, and going to my beloved Christmas Eve services. I'm excited that Rachel is coming with me- it'll be nice to have some company on the way up. It's really cute how excited she is about going with me. (She still seems to think I'm cool. Go figure.) Rachel is at that age where she so very much wants to be a grown up. She's 14 going on 24, know what I mean? But when she heard that PA got almost 2 feet of snow, there was that little girl again, jumping up and down and wanting to know if we could make a snowman when we get there. I'm thrilled that I'll be with my family, and that Rachel will be there, but sad that we won't be with Laurie on Christmas Day. I wish it were possible to be in two places at once.

I'm anxious to go home... and yet in some ways I'm not. Because Christmas makes me think of Emily. And I miss her desperately. It's been very easy to avoid thinking about her. Lauren and Rachel's decorations and traditions are not my decorations and traditions, therefore they are "safe". I don't see Emily everywhere I look.

Going home is different.

Home means Emily's macaroni wreath she made in kindergarten and the picture she colored on the refrigerator. Home means fighting over whose turn it was to move the mouse in the advent calendar and covering your tracks in the chocolate chip cookie dough. Home is the ornaments on the Christmas tree and endless hints about what's hidden in the brightly wrapped packages. Home is memory, and sometimes memory hurts.

But yet that's what I've been missing the most. Memories. The same thing that hurts is also the same thing that brings comfort. Memories can be painful, but forgetting is heart breaking. And I remember her most at Christmas.

I feel like this is such a depressing post for it being three days before Christmas. And I don't mean to be depressing... just honest.

I want it both ways. I want to remember and forget all at the same time.