Just a Little Christmas Horror Story

Such a busy weekend I had. I shopped for toys and gifts, baked bread and made soup, played Christmas music and danced around the kitchen. I did all these happy things so that I wouldn’t have to think.

I haven’t been watching TV or going on news websites. I turn the front page face down before reading the rest of the newspaper. I tune the car radio to the all-Christmas-music-all-the-time channel, and I don’t even like most Christmas music.

I won’t look at pictures of the first graders who died in Connecticut on Friday or the adults who died with them. I don’t want to know their names. I don’t want to hear the comments from their families. And I don’t want to think about the phone calls that went out to all the grandmas.

Because I am a grandma, of a sweet, smart, thoughtful first grader, and also a preschooler, second grader and sixth grader. I don’t want to think about what it would be like to know they wouldn’t be at my house on Christmas Day or any Christmas Day in the future.

I am angry and sad and sick to death of it all. Of mass killings that have become commonplace. Of turning on the local news and learning that another child was gunned down in their own neighborhood. I’m sick of the NRA and the enormous power of the gun lobby, the excuses and convoluted logic. I’m mad at people like me who didn’t fight harder for gun control.

I am going to two school Christmas programs this week. They will be fun and silly, and the kids will do what kids always do. But this year I will bring tissues.

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