Charles Brammall
Let me begin with an animal, because Christmas make more sense when we stop pretending we are above the rest of creation, or somehow exempt from the way absence quietly orders the world. Animals, after all, do not explain loss. They simply notice it, sniff it, circle it, and live with it.
Years ago, on a 12-day walk in Tassie, the sort where the day absolutely cooks you and the night pulls the rug out from under your expectations, I watched a wombat emerge just beyond the firelight. Chonky, dense, heavy, utterly unimpressed with us, our gear, and our earnest conversations.
It shuffled out of the scrub, circled the campsite slowly, sniffing, stopping, sniffing again, as though conducting a forensic investigation. What struck me was not his hesitation, but his confidence. Every few metres, it paused and stared toward a dark patch where something clearly ought to have been.
Another wombat, perhaps. A familiar scent. A remembered body. It kept checking the same empty place, as if the bush had mislaid something important and might yet put it back if given time. Then, with resigned dignity, it ambled off alone, accepting the absence without question.
I have never forgotten that wombat. I think of it every Christmas, usually when the noise drops away briefly and I notice myself glancing instinctively toward a space that feels oddly occupied by absence, like muscle memory, or love looking for somewhere to land.
Picture an overnight walk in December. The day has been blistering, flies relentless, sweat salty on your lips, the sun flattening colour and conversation alike. Now the temperature drops hard, because this country does that, a high diurnal range that delivers surprise, discomfort and sudden respect for jumpers.
Someone drags in a ridiculous log, the sort that smoulders for hours and looks faintly irresponsible. We sit round the fire, boots kicked off, mud still caked on our calves, plastic mugs in hand. Someone smokes a pipe, because there is always someone who smokes a pipe, and the sweet smell curls into the night. Someone else sips a Tawny.
The fire throws light unevenly. Faces flare and vanish. Someone tells a story they have told before. Someone else laughs too hard. But there is always one spot by the fire that feels like it belongs to someone who is not there. No one says it. Everyone knows it. The fire burns anyway.
That, I think, is Christmas, not as an event, but as a condition. It gathers people, food, light, and memory into one place, then quietly insists you notice who and what are missing, without ever asking whether you feel ready for that noticing.
Christmas, for all its fairy lights and genuine joy, has a peculiar acoustics problem. Joy carries. Absence lands with a thud, heavy and unmistakable, right in the middle of things, usually just as you thought you were coping, usually just as the plates are coming out.
The table gains an extra metaphorical chair no one quite knows what to do with, as if silence itself were a sacrament. We call this “missing loved ones”, which is polite, but wildly insufficient for what actually happens inside us when the prawns are peeled, and the talk turns casual.
What I experience is grief with a seasonal overlay, an ache harmonised in carols, played relentlessly in both keys, whether you like it or not, while something in you stubbornly insists on a minor and refuses to modulate, however much tinsel you apply.
Sometimes, if I am honest round the fire, the ache is sharpest when it is children, or grandchildren, who are missing. Or parents. Parents who have died. Children estranged. Grandchildren whose height marks never reach the doorframe because the pencil stopped too early, or the doorframe moved without them.
Children and grandchildren who should be noisier this year, demolishing prawns and pavlova, sticky-fingered and sunburnt, running through sprinklers or fighting over the cricket bat. Christmas is relentlessly child-and grandparent-shaped, and when one, or perish the thought, four, are absent, the silence does not whisper. It roars.
The church fathers would recognise this immediately. Augustine certainly would. That great connoisseur of restless hearts wrote, “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you,” after burying friends and a son, not from an ivory tower but from lived sorrow.
I read that differently now. Augustine knew the physics of loss. Restlessness is grief’s footnote. Calvin called the world a “theatre of God’s glory”, whose truth is always true. But the theatre will always go dark, and applause echoes oddly back at you, thin and hollow.
Thomas Hardy understood this chill. In Jude the Obscure, he writes, “The world does not despise us; it only neglects us.” Hardy knew the ache of children lost and futures cut short, hope mocked by circumstance rather than actively opposed.
Hermann Hesse, wrestling with memory and fractured identity, observed in Steppenwolf, “Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go.” Christmas tests that sentence annually, and I am rarely confident I am getting it right, or brave enough.
Patrick White, our Nobel curmudgeon, wrote in Riders in the Chariot, “The world is full of strange correspondences.” He understood how grief echoes through kitchens, backyards, and lounge rooms, making ordinary places feel briefly sacramental, as if charged with unscheduled meaning.
Shakespeare knew this too, especially in the less-polished corners. In Cymbeline, he writes, “Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust,” refusing the lie that youth or promise grants immunity from time or loss.
In King John, grief is given full spatial reality. Constance cries, “Grief fills the room up of my absent child.” Shakespeare grasped that absence is not nothing. It takes up space, oxygen, furniture, and rearranges how you move through rooms.
Christopher Marlowe, reckless and incandescent, has Doctor Faustus lament, “Where we are is hell.” Loss can feel like that, even on Christmas afternoon, with flies buzzing, the cricket commentary rolling on regardless, and everyone insisting you have another fruit punch.
John Bunyan wrote in Pilgrim’s Progress, “One leak will sink a ship.” Grief is rarely theatrical. It seeps. Christmas, with all its pressure, repetition, and ritual, finds the leaks quickly and presses on them without mercy.
The Bible itself does not muck about with sentimentality. Rachel is described as “weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted”. I love that line because it refuses to rush her, tidy her sorrow, or reframe it prematurely as something productive.
No angel tells her to pull herself together because it’s Christmas. Matthew drags that verse into the birth story, stitching missing children and grandchildren into the nativity fabric with stubborn honesty, refusing to let Bethlehem become decorative.
Even the Messiah learns absence early. Simeon blesses the baby, then predicts a sword through Mary’s soul. Christmas arrives carrying joy and grief in the same arms. No receipt. No refunds. No suggestion that one cancels the other out.
Jewish writers understand this without tinsel. Abraham Joshua Heschel called faith “a memory of what we were meant to be”. Memory cuts both ways. It remembers Eden and the empty chair with equal clarity and refuses to privilege one over the other.
When I read Paul speak of “groaning inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption”, it lands hard. That word adoption matters. Even the redeemed are waiting to be gathered properly, fully, finally, into a family where no chairs are empty.
Christian Philosopher Michael Polanyi helps here. He insisted that “we know more than we can tell”. Grief lives there. So does hope. Christmas works tacitly, not propositionally, felt before it is explained, endured before it is understood.
Kierkegaard would nod. He said life is “understood backwards but lived forwards”. Christmas does both at once, remembering what was and hoping for what is promised, often without warning, and rarely in neat emotional sequence.
Simone Weil spoke of attention as “love’s purest form”. Sitting with an empty chair, real or figurative, is a kind of attention. It is not efficient. It does not fix anything. But it is faithful, and sometimes that is the only obedience available.
Woollahra Anglican Rector Michael Jensen reminds us that Christmas does not deny suffering but locates it within a story where God enters it. That distinction matters more than most Christmas sermons admit, especially to those carrying grief quietly through crowded rooms.
Which is why music helps. It plonks itself by the fire and tells the truth sideways. Bowie sings, “We can be heroes, just for one day.” Courage measured in hours feels achievable, especially when long-term optimism feels like too much to manage.
Peter Gabriel sings, “I want to be your sledgehammer, why don’t you call my name?”, when he had just been replaced in Genesis by Phil Collins. Desire risking rejection sounds a lot like grief trying to stay relational rather than withdrawing, trying to keep speaking when silence would be safer.
Aussie Paul Kelly asks, from prison, “Who’s gonna make the gravy now?” Absence announces itself through rituals, through missing children and grandchildren who once defined the table’s volume, timing, and mild chaos. Grief often enters through domestic details.
Nobel Literature Laureate Dylan murmurs, “There’s no success like failure. And failure’s no success at all”. Christmas survival often feels exactly like that, especially when you have not cancelled, not escaped, not numbed yourself, but simply stayed and endured with others.
Elton John asks, “What have I got to do to make you care?” McCartney answers, “Let it be.” Both belong round the fire, one aching, one releasing, both offering permission to feel without resolving.
Regina Spektor insists, “I’m the hero of the story.” Freddy Mercury counters, “Nothing really matters.” Between them sits Ecclesiastes, quietly humming wisdom through clenched teeth, reminding us that joy and futility often share a verse.
The Proclaimers promise, “I would walk five hundred miles.” Love counts kilometres when presence fails. Parents and grandparents of missing children know that arithmetic intimately, measuring devotion in distance, time, and unanswered effort. Or not in distance- they may be in the next suburb, or a quick phone call or text away, but still silent, absent. But not even needing to be absent.
JC Ryle insisted, “Our afflictions are but for a moment.” He meant framed by resurrection, not trivialised by optimism or seasonal cheer, not dismissed by people telling you it will all feel better soon.
Sydney preacher and teacher Simon Manchester has often said God wastes nothing. Not even grief. Not even Christmas grief. Not even empty chairs, awkward silences, or conversations that circle without landing anywhere useful.
Ray Galea speaks of “learning to live with unanswered questions without surrendering hope”. That feels like an Advent definition that actually works, especially when certainty feels brittle, and explanation feels intrusive.
And Roald Dahl, unexpectedly wise about goodness, wrote, “If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.” He knew darkness. He did not deny it.
Dahl wrote that for children, but it lands on adults carrying loss. Good thoughts do not erase grief. They glow alongside it. Jesus’ Christmas is allowed to shine without explaining itself or justifying its brightness.
The Reformers would approve of this honesty. Luther insisted God is found “under the opposite”. Christmas under grief. Presence under absence. The salvific death of Jesus hidden in the grungy stone manger, like a plot twist you only understand later.
So I set the empty chair. I light a candle. I say names. I keep the fire going. I let the pipe go out and be relit. I stay, even when staying feels unproductive and oddly brave.
And then, late, when the fire is low and the talk thins, the wombat comes back. Dragging something absurd and small. A half-gnawed apple. Someone else’s forgotten food. A gift, of sorts, offered without ceremony.
It sits exactly where the absence had been, eating calmly, unbothered, inhabiting the space rather than replacing what was missing. It does not solve anything. It simply stays, solid and present, under the stars.
Roald Dahl once said that kindness is a kind of magic. Perhaps Christmas is that too. The planting of a Wonderous soteriological seed. A diaspora. Not restoration quite yet. Not full explanation right now. Just presence where absence was loudest, glowing gently without asking permission. As The King, The Priest, and the patented rescuing corpse.
Like that wombat, I still glance toward the dark place. But I stay by the fire of Jesus’ birth. The fire of His death keeps burning. That, with His resurrection, in the end, is Christmas. Not a cure- yet. But one set in motion. Heading towards His perfect, eternal heavenly Kinghood. His international all-powerful Regency. A companion and assurance for the time being. A down payment, a deposit, inheritance promised. Christmas permits the ache to sing honestly, and sometimes— astonishingly— softly, it resolves.