1 Mother 2 Another

Everyone who knows me, knows that I
complain every year about Christmas’ ever-increasingly early
onslaught. I remember the good old days, when I’d crab about
the early Christmas as storekeepers decorated their aisles the day
after Thanksgiving. Ah, the good old days. Now it seems we
can’t even wait for Halloween to be over before the Yule
season takes hold; our craft store had Christmas trees and
ornaments up the beginning of OCTOBER.

In some ways, I get it. Christmas is
everyone’s favorite time of year, so why not enjoy it as long
as possible? And now that I’m a mom with a bigger household
to run, I definitely spend most of November doing my baking and
shopping and organizing in an attempt to enjoy the month of
December with my kids and not have it be a panicked, stress-filled
time leading up to our Lord’s birthday. So as reluctant as I
am to admit it, the early onslaught helps me – a BIT.


My kids, however, are a different story. They both want to know
when Christmas will FINALLY come, and HOW MUCH LONGER will it take?
I have to sound them out on their Christmas wishes so I might buy
the items they really want, but once they’ve begun talking
about a Christmas list they want to see results pronto.


We’ve got some hard and fast rules to pace ourselves through
the holiday season. First, we’ve got our Advent calendar,
which places the Nativity scene out one day at a time until Jesus
comes out from behind door number 24. And we pick our tree a few
weeks early, but wait to decorate it until the Sunday before
Christmas. We bake early, but don’t eat any of it until the
parties arrive. So we do gradually build a sense of anticipation
and try to keep the reins on this runaway sleigh of a holiday as
best we can.


But when your four-year-old says impatiently for the tenth time,
“WHEN is Santa going to bring my ballet barre already? I
can’t WAIT any longer!!” well, you know you’re in
for a long several weeks.