By Michael Smith — Reflective MVS
What My Grandmother Might Say Now
Seven years is a strange kind of distance.
Long enough that grief no longer announces itself. Short enough that certain memories still arrive uninvited, especially in December. Last year, I wrote about my grandmother and the traditions she carried with her, most notably the small nativity scene she set up every Christmas. It wasn’t elaborate. It wasn’t theatrical. It was deliberate. A reminder, she seemed to believe, that Christmas wasn’t meant to be loud or triumphant. It was meant to be human.
That reflection still sits with me.
If you haven’t read it, it lives here:
Keeping Christmas Alive: My Grandmother’s Legacy of Love and Tradition
This year, the question feels different.
Not what traditions did she leave us, but what would she make of this moment we’re in now?
My grandmother was born in 1935 to Irish Catholic immigrants. She grew up in a world where institutions did not bend easily toward mercy, and she never confused legality with morality. She believed in rules, but she believed even more strongly in right and wrong. And she cursed like a sailor when the two got twisted together.
Recently, my sister shared a story I hadn’t known before. During the Obama–McCain election, she was living in Florida. My grandmother called her to make sure she had voted. Voting mattered deeply to her, not as a partisan ritual, but as something earned, something protected by people who didn’t always get the benefit of being taken seriously by the state.
My sister, half-joking, told her she voted against Obama just to see what her reaction would be.
I wasn’t on that call. I don’t know her exact words or tone. But knowing my grandmother, I can imagine there was no laughter in response. Not because she demanded political uniformity, but because she understood the weight of history. You don’t joke about doors people fought to open. You don’t treat participation as a game when others paid for it in silence, risk, or survival.
That story landed with me as I’ve been watching what’s happening now.
This year, a nativity scene went viral that unsettled a lot of people. Installed outside a church, it depicted the Holy Family not bathed in soft light, but restrained and policed. Baby Jesus lay in a manger behind what appeared to be zip-tie-like bindings. Mary and Joseph were portrayed as detained migrants, watched over not by wise men, but by figures meant to evoke immigration enforcement.
The backlash was immediate. Critics called it disrespectful. Political. Blasphemous.
Historically, it was none of those things.
The biblical account of the Holy Family is one of displacement, fear, and flight from state violence. Mary and Joseph flee because a ruler feels threatened by a child. They cross borders to survive. They exist, briefly, as refugees. This isn’t a modern rewrite. It’s the original story, stripped of comfort.
What unsettled people wasn’t the politicization of Christmas. It was the removal of its sentimentality.
And that’s where I imagine my grandmother would land.
I can hear her now, scoffing at the whole thing, saying people love Jesus right up until he starts looking like someone they’d report, detain, or tell to go back where he came from. Cute in a manger, intolerable once he reminds them who he actually stood with.
What we’re witnessing now — ICE raids, family separations, cruelty explained away as “policy” — wouldn’t confuse her. She lived long enough to see compassion rationed and injustice laundered through procedure. She knew that when systems do harm, individuals often hide behind the language of necessity.
Christmas, to her, was never about nostalgia. It was about conscience.
The manger wasn’t a centerpiece. It was a reminder. That holiness shows up where power tries to erase it. In the poor. The displaced. The inconvenient.
Seven years after her passing, I still find myself measuring the season against her instincts. Would this sit right with her? Would she accept the explanations we’re offered? Would she buy the idea that some suffering is simply unavoidable?
I already know my answer.
She’d curse. She’d ask sharper questions. She’d remind us that laws change, borders shift, and empires fall, but the moral test stays the same: how a society treats the most vulnerable when it thinks no one is paying attention.
Christmas doesn’t need defending.
It needs remembering.
And sometimes remembering looks less like a peaceful manger and more like a mirror we’d rather not stand in front of.
0 Comments