The Christmas Orange Tradition

The holidays are extremely hard when you are grieving the loss of your child.  For the last 4 years I have just wanted to run away and hide from everything--I hated that everything was so "happy" and "cheerful" when I felt like crap.  I've had to find a new normal as far as Christmas traditions for our family and that new normal has changed each year that I have added another angel baby to our family.  I wanted to share one of the traditions that I started my first Christmas that I loss Janessa.

I had bought Janessa a Christmas stocking when I was pregnant with her and if I could go back now I would have hung that stocking up then and celebrated what was her 1st and last Christmas with her.  After she died and Christmas approached, I didn't know what to do with her Christmas Stocking.  Should I hang it up with all the others, or would that be too hard to see or make others uncomfortable or make them think I was a wacko hanging up a Christmas stocking for a dead baby?   Then there was all the emotions around the fact that her stocking would remain empty just like my empty arms and heart.  But, I didn't want to just pretend that she never existed.  I finally came up with a new tradition for our family that helped calm all those feelings.  We read the story The Christmas Orange (this is the link to that story The Christmas Orange) at the beginning of December.  Then we try to do acts of kindness for people and every time we do we put a little slip of paper that has a smile face on it into Janessa's stocking.  Then on Christmas Morning I put a chocolate orange into her stocking and we dump out all of the "kindness papers"  So her stocking is not empty it is full of LOVE.  That really helped me get through that first Christmas.  I had a harder time with this tradition when I added Hope and Jason's Christmas stockings.  Last year it was hard trying to fill up 3 angel baby stockings and I was angry because I didn't want to fill up Jason's stocking, I wanted to still be pregnant with him so this tradition didn't go over quite as well.

This year was overwhelming to me adding Rae Anne's Christmas stocking and it was frustrating me because there was just no way to fill up 4 stockings now.  That was when I decided to change that tradition a little.  I hung up the Christmas stockings before Thanksgiving this year and I have strips of paper that every day we write things we're thankful for that day or something good that happened that day or an act of kindness we did or someone else did on and we are filling up each of their stockings with that.  On Christmas Eve we are going to take those slips of paper and make a huge Christmas paper chain that we will put around our Christmas tree as a reminder of all the simple and small little good things that have happened.  I'm also happy to report that I have found 4 different flavors of chocolate oranges so each of my angels will have a unique and different chocolate orange in their stocking.  That was really bothering me that they would all be the same chocolate orange.

I've found over the past 5 years that doing just little things like this has helped take away some of the sting and hurt that the holidays seem to bring.