We three girls determinedly walked the six blocks to the Christmas tree lot. We were going to find the perfect tree like we did every Christmas. It was Christmas Eve and the pickings were slim. The tree lot was about to close for the season.

Cue the Hallmark movie. The beautiful young widow and her three charming daughters go to tree lot on Christmas Eve only to find that the last tree had just sold. Up steps the handsome, spiritually sensitive Christmas tree lot owner who just happens to have an eight-foot Balsam Fir and saves the day as snow falls softly from the crystal-clear night sky.

Back to my story.

Our father had died, and then, as if on cue, a week later, our cellar flooded after a storm. We three sisters waded down into the mess and pulled out boxes of Christmas ornaments. Mom had never celebrated Christmas before marrying Daddy. When she saw the damaged but rescued ornaments, we thought she would be happy.

But every ornament we saved was a painful reminder of love found and lost. Never mind. Save them we did.

So my sisters and I were headed to the tree lot against my mother’s wishes. She didn’t want a tree this Christmas, the first without her much-loved husband and our father. Her grief sat too close to the surface.

We were on our own. If we wanted the tree, then we would have to get it home and put it up ourselves.

When we got to the tree lot, we weren’t exactly charming to the owner as we went through the motions of finding the perfect tree. Too short, too scrawny, too crooked. Most of the trees looked pathetic as we repeatedly told the owner.

In a rush of Christmas charity or an overwhelming desire to get rid of us, the tree lot owner told us to hurry up, pick a tree and we could have it for free. Spurred on by his generosity, we quickly found the tree and sweetly asked if he could tie twine around it so it would be easier to drag home. We could be charming when we wanted to.

The tree helped some, but that Christmas was closer to miserable than merry.

In his Advent devotional, Repeat the Sounding Joy, Christopher Ash writes about the disgrace of Elizabeth and Zechariah—the disgrace of childlessness. Ash writes that their disgrace is a “vivid example of the misery of living in a world under sin and the righteous judgment of God. Every sickness, every sadness, every disability is—in this sense—visible evidence that we live in a world under the righteous judgment of God.”

Ash points out that we all are marked in some way with Elizabeth’s disgrace, and the “removal of this ‘disgrace’ is a sign of the kindness and mercy of God, as ‘dis-grace’ is swept away by grace.”

My mother’s marks of disgrace that year were widowhood, sorrow, little income, uncertainty. There was no Hallmark Christmas movie ending that year. Fortunately, my mother didn’t need the movie ending to Christmas. And she didn't stay there. In years to come, we shared the joy with redeemed friends and family and of rescued ornaments from the flood. (I still have a few.)

In retrospect, that first miserable Christmas was closer to grace and truth than we ever imagined.

Christmas came because the Savior had come. His grace had removed the biggest disgrace of sin. His grace would remove the disgrace of my mom’s poverty and sorrow, not with a Christmas windfall but with the Christmas affirmation that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)

Miserable or merry, Christmas comes to us full of grace and truth, full of promise of salvation and righteousness, full of grace.