Article December 15, 1986 Issue

Alone at Christmas?

Christmas seems like the time when we should all be with our families. But what if there is no family near? Where do we fit in? Where do we go?

Tonny A. Bundesen

Since I had no family near, for some time after my husband passed on, it became important to me to know well in advance where I was going to spend Christmas. I would start during summer and early fall trying to resolve this question, and the closer the season came, the more time I would spend trying to work it out.

I usually managed to get an invitation early in December. Then when I was asked where I was going to spend Christmas, I would have a place where I thought I belonged and could tell people so. Even though I knew that it was rather ridiculous to spend so much time on this, it seemed a shame to have to confess that I had no family nearby with whom I was going to celebrate that important event.

Then one year it dawned on me that in spite of my feelings to the contrary, it might be a good idea to spend Christmas in my own company. Instead of always going to friends and their families, I could spend the time alone with my dear Father-Mother God. I had been taking another look at this whole question of what it means to be alone, and I found a new view of aloneness in an address by Mrs. Eddy to the members of her Church: "The Christian Scientist is alone with his own being and with the reality of things."^{Message to The Mother Church for 1901, p. 20.} I knew she wasn't speaking of some sort of isolationism, because in the same address she told her listeners they must meet the Christian demand to live more unselfish, loving lives.