Her Momness and I love Christmas! If Christmas was a dessert, we’d eat it up with a spoon! The decorating! The music! The lights! The tinsel and mistletoe. Food, festivities, ugly sweaters and sappy seasonal movies. The rejoicing. Christ the Savior is born!

But the season can also be tough. Bittersweet. Memories of lost loved ones seem especially keen at this time of year. Especially when the loss is fresh.

I’ll let Mom fill you in:

Her name was Bebe.

She was my best friend during my university years, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. We had the same major and several classes together.

A highlight of my senior year was a script writing assignment for a Broadcast Journalism class. Bebe and I teamed up and wrote a script based on Tom Selleck’s Magnum, P.I. Whenever we hit writer’s block, we cued up the show’s theme song. It never failed to restore our creative juices. We got the highest grade in the class on that script, by the way. But the real reward was writing and working with Bebe.

We were both big basketball fans. With an undefeated men’s basketball game our senior year, Bebe and I attended every game. I remember cramming a bunch of friends into Bebe’s car and driving to Santa Barbara for an away game – about three hours away. She drove. We won. Got back to campus in the wee hours. And how Bebe flew to Kansas City, KS for the National Championship – at her own expense. (I was sitting in the cafeteria with her when she wrote the check for her plane ticket.)

Also piling into Bebe’s car on Sunday mornings for church. Lunch in the cafeteria later with Build Your Own ice cream sundaes. Homework. Night classes (ugh!). Textbooks so thick they could choke a mule. Class notes. Lots and lots of class notes. Also sports events, concerts, chapels, holidays, campus movies, and Christmas caroling. Term papers, final exams, and chocolate. Lots and lots of chocolate.

We graduated together, seated half a row apart. We stayed in touch for several years after graduation. Then Bebe moved back to Illinois to pursue career opportunities and be closer to family. As often happens, life got busy. My husband and I moved. Babies arrived. Life got busier. Headed in different directions, we sort of lost touch. Bebe and I reconnected via social media awhile back. Just picked up where we’d left off.

Bebe was like that. Patient. Kind. Supportive. Gracious. Quietly generous. Available. And Brilliant.

A Different Kind of Christmas

So much more. So many good times with this remarkable, gifted woman. So many great memories.

Bebe Minton was promoted to glory on November 26 after a brief battle with a rare form of cancer. Her memorial service was December 10. Still hard to believe. We were unable to attend the service due to distance. But we watched a bunch of old Magnum, P.I. episodes in Bebe’s honor.

Different

So as this Mark Schultz tune so eloquently explains, it’s a “different kind of Christmas this year”:

The Morning

My favorite book in C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia is the seventh and final book, The Last Battle. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently, especially these lines:

“And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures had only been the cover and the title page. Now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before. …

The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: THIS is the morning.”

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Goodbye, my dear friend.

See you in The Morning:

Tethered to Hope. Welcome Home: