Sparkle, Sparkle, Shooting Star

December 25, 2024 — The Journal Entry

“Today is Christmas. In past years I would say it is my favorite holiday, but now I am not so sure. Every year it seems to get more depressing as I learn about what my mama had to deal with when she was with my father. I wish to have half of her strength someday.

We opened presents this morning, and I enjoyed each one and had fun doing so. Christmas Eve night, I helped her wrap my brother’s presents while she finished everything else for Christmas, and I also wanted to help because I know it’s a lot on her.

She will never know how much I adore her for her strength and sanity.

She has simply shown up in my life and taken on a role no one asked her to, but I will be forever thankful that she did because I am who I am today because of her.

Each year, I grow to dislike the holidays because they don’t seem as magical as they used to when I was younger, but she somehow pulls out a little holiday magic each year. I have no idea how she does this.

Having someone who is dependable and there when you need them isn’t easy to find these days, and I am glad that she showed up when she did because I don’t know where I would be without her.

She goes to show that blood isn’t thicker than water.”

I read those words — her words — on Christmas night, after the gifts had been unwrapped, after the laughter had settled, after everything I had done to pull magic out of thin air. And I sat there and cried.

She has no idea.

No idea that she is the magic.

No idea that every Christmas, every tradition, every quiet moment of joy I have ever given her has been because of who she was when she was little.

I walked into her life late.

I missed all of her firsts.

I never got to hear her first words or see her take her first steps. I wasn’t there to watch her learn to ride a bike or lose her first tooth.

But I will never forget our first Christmas together.

She was six and a half, and she believed in everything. She believed in twinkling lights and holiday traditions, in the unspoken magic that fills the air in December. And she wanted to celebrate all of it.

So much so that the next year, at seven and a half, she looked at me — this woman who had stepped into her life — and said:

“We need to celebrate Hanukkah.”

Her father and I had been raised in Southern Baptist churches. We lived in a small town in Texas, near the buckle of the Bible Belt. And yet, this child — my child — wanted to celebrate Hanukkah.

“Why Hanukkah?” I asked.

She didn’t have an answer beyond pure, unfiltered childhood joy. She wanted to experience it, to understand it, to pull it into her orbit the way she pulled in everything beautiful.

And the thing is — I was already wrestling with Christmas myself. I hated what it had become. I watched the kids getting caught up in the “gimmees,” overwhelmed with too much. I feared they wouldn’t appreciate anything because they were given everything.

But this girl? She saw Christmas differently.

She saw lights and warmth and possibility. She saw a world worth celebrating.

And so, for her, I leaned in. I wrapped her in the Christmas magic she created for herself. If that meant six thousand twinkling lights, so be it. If that meant waking up at ungodly hours so she could eat warm chocolate chip cookies under the glow of the tree before school, so be it.

She was seven and a half that year. And she would never be seven and a half again.

So I gave her the magic she deserved, the magic she carried inside her.

Childhood Christmases were magic from then on.

But as Christmas — and magic — tend to do, some of the sparkle was dimmed by the natural order of things.

As we get older, we start to see through the veil. We see behind the magic. We realize that Santa Claus is somehow more than what we understood, and yet so much less, all at the same time.

And we get a bit jaded.

Along with this natural unraveling of childhood magic, shortly after she turned sixteen, everything turned upside down.

That was the year we had to make the hard but unavoidable decision to leave their father.

We left.

And no matter how much I tried to hold onto it, Christmas felt different in the years that followed.

There were still lights, still gifts, still traditions. But the ease, the warmth, the magic that had once felt so effortless? It became something I had to fight for.

Christmas became something I had to hold together for her.

Because no matter how much she wished for a new life, no matter how much she loved me, we had still left everything she had ever known.

So the Christmas she wrote that journal entry — at almost 20 years old — wasn’t just any Christmas. It came after a string of holidays where everything had felt different.

And yet, she wrote about the magic. She wrote about me.

She said she didn’t know how I did it.

And I sat there, reading her words, thinking — how can she not see it?

How can she not see that every single thing I did was because of her? That she was the catalyst, the reason behind it all?

How could she not remember that she wished for me?

Because she did.

Somewhere along the way, in the quiet spaces between childhood and growing up, she told me something I will never forget.

She was little — maybe eight, maybe nine — when she said:

“After my parents divorced, I saw a falling star. I made a wish for a new mom. And God sent me you.”

She wished for me.

And I have spent every moment since making sure she never had to wish for anything again.

And maybe, deep down, she understood that in ways even I hadn’t realized.

Because in that same journal entry, she wrote something else.

“She goes to show that blood isn’t thicker than water.”

And she’s right — just not in the way most people think.

People hear that phrase and assume it means family ties are the strongest bond we have. But they don’t realize that’s not the full saying.

The original phrase?

“The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.”

It means that chosen bonds — the people we stand beside, the people we choose to walk through life with — can be stronger than blood.

It means that love isn’t just something we are born into. It’s something we build.

And she and I? We built something unshakable.

So the day after Christmas this past year, I sat down and started writing her a letter. In red and green ink, I told her everything.

That she is stronger than she realizes.

That the magic she feels slipping away was never about Christmas at all — it was about her.

That I am who I am today because of her.

But in true ADHD fashion, I didn’t finish it.

I picked it up a month later, scribbled a little more, then abandoned it again.

Finally, on her 20th birthday, I handed it to her — unfinished, messy, exactly like me — saying, “Because I suck, but I love you.”

And then, later that day, she walked through the door with a new tattoo.

She smiled as she tilted her head, pulling her hair back to reveal a tiny shooting star behind her ear.

“It’s for you, Mama,” she said. “I got it for you.”

And just like that, the wish she made when she was just a little girl, became an indelible reminder that the universe gives us the desires of our souls.

She doesn’t think Christmas feels magical anymore.

But this?

This is magic.

The kind that lasts.

The kind that stays.

The kind that says:

“I wished for you. And you stayed.”