I just wanted to say to all you guys, Happy Christmas, Kwanza, Hanukkah, Festivus, whatever it may be, this month!I'm going to take the month of December off.Anyway, before I DO go, I wanted to leave you with an article a local columnist wrote about 13 years ago, that my family read every year.Happy Christmas.For many of us, Christmas comes full of holes. A parent who died. A sibling who moved far away. A family member estranged from the family.Someone, it seems, is always missing, someone with whom we once shared Christmas and without whom Christmas seems a shade paler than once before.For years, it has been true in my family.No matter how big or festive the assembly, some ghost is always hovering near the turkey and the tree.But even as I lament that none of them will be with us, I know that all of them will.We'll do what families do, plugging the holes in Christmas present with memories of Christmases come and gone, telling stores to conjure up the ghosts.The spirits of the absent guests always remind me that Christmas is never just one Christmas.It is the sum of all the Christmases you've known and all the people who have inhabited them.Perhaps more than any other day, Christmas is the measure of passing time the collective clock by which we count out our lives.It's a mutating event anchored in unchanging rituals. New characters join any family's cast--new spouses, babies, lovers--but the old cast is still clattering around in the wings.In my family, we usually take a moment at the Christmas meal to raise a glass and say, "To those who can't be with us."And in that moment, they are.Mary Schmich