1 Mother 2 Another

Christmas has quit quietly creeping up on us and has begun its all-out full-scale charge towards us.  Seven days and counting.  I’m reasonably confident I finished my shopping yesterday; now all that’s left is the wrapping and the mailing.  Our family room is a sea of shopping bags and gift wrap and ribbons, and we’ve got boxes stacked ready in the hall to pack for out-of-town mailings.  Having shopped so much online this year, my outgoing boxes are rather more dependent on other deliveries than I’d like, but what can you do?  My other big regret this year is the holiday baking; I’ve always made labor-intensively –decorated sugar cookies and stacks of gingerbread and fudge and other goodies to mail to family and friends.  This year the baking’s getting done one pan at a time, in between naps and bowls of strained sweet potatoes.  So I’m guessing the food will be heading out a bit later than usual.  I suppose I could stay up one night doing it all, but it’s the process as much as the product that I enjoy, so I refuse to force myself to some time schedule.

On the good side of things, Christmas being so close at hand means I can take off my restraints and slide head-on into holiday anticipation!  With the Christmas retail season beginning earlier and earlier every year, I always hold myself a bit aloof from it all for as long as possible: I refuse to sing along with Christmas carols in the drugstore, don’t let myself get swept up in the Claymation marathons on T.V., and avoid gaping at all the elaborate decorations in stores and on the streets.  I’m always afraid of over-feasting on Christmas cheer and becoming surfeited too soon, turning into a Scrooge by the actual day.  But with the Day rapidly approaching I can throw off my fetters and Fa La La at the top of my lungs!

We made a good start of that today, with the decorating of the tree.  We started “dressing” the house yesterday and we’ve had our tree for a couple weeks now but it’s stood clad only in lights thus far (part of my intentional aloofness – Brian humors me.)  Today as we took out all the ornaments from their boxes – ornaments that Brian and I have been hanging on our respective trees for dozens of years – we came across the ornament we got last year for our annual ornament selection: the “Parents-To-Be” sign hanging over a crib.  We can’t help but think about this time last year: how excited we were knowing she was coming (though not knowing she was a she!) and realizing our holidays would never be the same again.  I mourned the passing of my last quiet intimate Christmas with Brian, even though I knew they were about to get better and better.  Christmas for me is all about family – spending decadent amounts of time with people you normally only see in the morning or at night, going to the movies or skating or sitting around the house watching videos.  And it’s about traditions: keeping alive the many traditions from our families, forming our own, and passing them on to our daughter to carry down through her family.  Our ornaments, for example – we don’t have one of those trees with color-coordinated and matching decorations.  Every ornament means something to one or both of us, and as tattered and faded as some of them are, those ornaments spell out our life history for everyone to see, from all my ballerina figurines to Brian’s Mickey Mouse statue and Dallas Cowboys ball.
And today for the first time a third person’s ornament was hung on our family tree.  Madeleine’s got her first decoration to begin her own collection that she’ll hopefully take with her when she starts her own family, and I have to say, it’s amazing how hanging just one ornament takes a tree from looking somehow incomplete to perfectly finished.  Madeleine’s face lit up when she saw the newly decorated tree, and she stared in awe at all the pretty baubles hanging from the branches.  I put her in her bouncy seat next to the tree so she could gaze enraptured at the majestic fir.

Which she did, right up to the moment she leaned in and tried to eat Mickey.

I guess the awe factor wears off quickly.