On being home for Christmas

For more than a dozen years now, I’ve spent the days leading up to Christmas in search of a special gift. Not the kind you can buy at the mall or charge on your credit card but the gift of a traditional midnight Mass. It goes back to my childhood, when I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to attend midnight Mass with my grandmother at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Denver.

I was 13 the first time I got to stay up and attend midnight Mass with my grandmother. She lived only a few blocks away from the cathedral, which we walked to alone in a gritty urban neighborhood.