What December Still Knows

A grown man revisits the boy who learned loss in the season of joy.

Every year, December arrives like a familiar visitor… carrying light, carrying music, carrying an ache that never truly leaves me.

It begins with a hush inside my chest, the kind that comes before a memory rises. December is the month my mother left this world. Even as a grown man, I feel the ten-year-old in me stir awake as the evenings turn cooler and December settles into the air.

Grief is strange. It ages, but it never grows old.

And yet December also carries my daughter’s birthday, tucked later in the month like a small lantern glowing in a far-off place.
She is an adult now, living with her husband in another country, but her voice on the phone still brings warmth into the cold corners of this month.

Light and loss in the same breath.
December has always been that way for me.

When I think back to that first December without my mother, the memory rises with the clarity of a prayer.

The village is draped in celebration. Stars glimmer on verandahs, strings of coloured lights blink like cheerful messengers. But in my grandmother’s house, there is only one star hanging from a lonely hook. A single wounded glow gathers dead insects at its pointed tip, making it appear dark and grim.

Granny follows tradition. Forty days of mourning.
And so Christmas, for us, becomes muted like a church bell rung softly.

I see myself walking behind Granny and my cousins through the cemetery, weaving between graves like they form a maze designed only for grief. We clear wilted flowers and burnt-out candles around my mother’s resting place.
I cup the flame of a new candle against the December wind, guarding it the way I once wished I could have guarded her life.

The rustling leaves.
The cold stone beneath my fingers.
The priest’s prayers on Sundays.
It all comes back with an ache that hasn’t learnt how to age.

There is a stillness in that memory that feels spiritual, a feeling I did not understand then but which I recognise now.
A presence.
A nearness.
The kind of quiet companionship that Autobiography of a Yogi speaks of.  The soul that does not vanish. The love that does not lose its form, only its body.

Even now, when I think of those moments under the rustling trees, I sense something invisible standing beside that little boy. Holding him. Steadying him.

But Christmas refuses to be silenced entirely.

Carollers barge in every night, lanterns swinging, voices loud enough to wake the dead if only they were willing. Someone pretending to be Santa always arrives wearing a saggy red costume and a cotton beard that keeps threatening to fall off. My cousins and I try to peek under the mask to see which uncle is hiding behind the ho-ho-ho.

And even though I am in mourning, even though I am reminded to stay calm, even though there is vegetarian food for me while others enjoy the feast,
a small smile escapes me.

I realise now that this too was grace. Joy slipping in through the smallest cracks. Reminding a grieving child that sorrow and celebration sometimes travel together. And that grief never truly blocks happiness. It only makes it arrive quietly.

The holiday season ends. The forty days pass.
And life starts shifting again.

I see myself standing at the door of our new home in Ernakulam. A small compound, an unfamiliar neighbourhood, a bus to catch early every morning.

Granny comes with us, carrying the softness of my childhood on her shoulders.

She becomes the anchor of our little household, her presence a soothing rhythm.
She becomes my mother without ever claiming the title.

Her Bible stories fill my evenings. Her cooking restores the parts of me that loss has hollowed out. She tries to make the city feel like home, even while her own heart remains anchored to her village.

But there is something else too, something I did not understand as a child.
The way she looked at the sky when she prayed.
The way she stood still for a moment before lighting the lamp in the evening.
A quiet reverence that felt like she was listening to someone I couldn’t see.

I understand it better now.
Love doesn’t disappear. It simply shifts its place in our lives.

And so, December remains both beautiful and brutal.

It holds the shadow of a boy lighting a candle in the wind.
It holds the blessing of a daughter’s distant birthday call.
It brings festive winds, and it brings a quiet, private grief that still knocks softly on the inside of my chest.

Every year, when December arrives, the man I am places a steady hand on the boy I once was.
Together, we stand between the light and the loss, learning how both can belong in the same month.

And somewhere, quiet, unseen, patient,
I like to believe my mother stands too.
Not gone.
Just changed.
Still part of the inner music that guides me through every December.
Teaching me, in her own silent way,
to be brave.