By Anna Quinlan
@annaisbadatig

The traditional Christmas story of my Sunday School upbringing, the pinnacle moment of God becoming man, plays out in a Plan B location. There was no room in the inn, so the baby, the Christ Child himself, was instead born in a barn and laid in a manger. I always imagined that Mary and Joseph were pretty devastated to have been turned away from the inn that night; scared, disappointed, resistant to accept the reality that they had nowhere to go. 

But maybe, in the end, they were grateful it played out the way it did. I’m not totally sure I believe that Christmas story as a literal recounting of factual events that occurred exactly as they were depicted on my Sunday School felt boards, but I do believe that Plan B is sometimes a gift we don’t appreciate until we are living it, and this past Christmas just may have been the most precious example of that for me.

I should’ve been in my Grandma’s double wide, surrounded by some combination of my 13 first cousins and their spouses and dates and babies. I should’ve been next to a husband of my own, my dad’s laugh audible throughout the house while my mom and aunt Kathy compared notes on the wines they brought. 

But there was no room in that inn last year. My husband and I split up last summer, my parents followed the governor’s instructions to abstain from socializing indoors, and although my 96 year old good-timing Grandma probably still would’ve happily hosted 30 people in her mobile home, none of us would let her. So, where would my two sons and I have Christmas dinner?

A thing about divorce (and probably lots of hard life circumstances, I’d guess) is that the whole thing is Plan B, and in the mess of figuring out where to go when there’s no room in the inn, sometimes you stumble upon a cozy little barn that’s actually just right.

My friend Sarah’s dining room table was exactly the shelter I needed this past Christmas. It was probably only the third or fourth time I’d been in her home; truth be told, if I’d been asked to list my closest 10 friends I don’t think she would have made the list prior to that Christmas dinner. But she caught me in a vulnerable moment one afternoon, and she was smart enough to know that preparing for the first Christmas after a divorce might as well be a journey through the desert in search of a safe place to give birth, and she was brave enough (and gracious enough) to ask me about it.

When I revealed that I didn’t have a plan other than attempting to distract my kids with a gratuitous amount of presents, she did not hesitate to invite me to dinner at her house. It was not a courtesy invite; I can’t put my finger on what made that evident, but I knew that she meant it and I can’t fully express how simultaneously terrifying and relieving it was to accept her invitation. It certainly wasn’t the inn I was used to, but what a humbling gift to be invited inside from the lonely cold.

We were our own motley Nativity scene as we circled around a charcuterie board and fussed over fitting all the main dishes in the oven: There was Sarah, her husband and their toddler, her ex-husband and their six year old, her stepfather whose skin color does not match hers, her mother-in-law with the flawless grandmotherly manicure, and my two sons and me. The ex-husband had spent the night there on Christmas Eve so that he could watch his son discover what Santa had left under the tree without depriving him of sharing the morning with his half-brother. Sarah’s stepdad told stories about coaching her high school softball team and how he was always so proud of her. I shared the story of adopting my youngest son from the foster system, and Sarah’s husband wiped tears from his eyes right there at the dinner table. We all intermittently glanced over at the kids’ table, silently knowing they were the reason for all of this, these battle-scarred love stories that defied title or tradition. Maybe babies have been saving humanity ever since that Christmas story baby was born in a manger, Plan B upon Plan B upon Plan B. 

Somehow, despite the caravan of painful stories that we all carried with us to that dinner table, despite the obvious fact that most of us didn’t really belong there, despite the divorce and the Covid and the mess of all of it, there was room at the table for all of us. It wasn’t my grandma’s table like I had always known, but it was exactly the table I needed to be at on that holiest of winter nights.