Posts
For the past few weeks I've been texting the Boys photos of the goings-on in the House on the Corner: Gallons of peppernuts baked and stored in ZipLocs. A gigantic stack of Amazon boxes that had me asking Husband if we can make the UPS guy a dependent on our next tax return. The Dueling Santas.
I have noted before that my slavish devotion to Christmas traditions winds down a little with every year. Years ago I decorated multiple rooms; now if there is an ornament or piece of tinsel outside the confines of the living room it is there by accident. Years ago I made six varieties of candy to distribute to friends and neighbors; now I think of these friends and neighbors fondly and wish them a warm Merry Christmas, or Happy Holidays, or I Love Your Ugly Sweater, or whatever I think they would like to hear.
Years ago I hung all of our stockings from the mantle, just under the formal nativity set. I did that for 15 years, until we remodeled the living room and covered the (non-functioning) gas fireplace behind a new wall.
I know! Joanna and Chip are looking at me sadly--not that we covered up the fireplace, but that we didn't just take ALL the walls in the house out so that we could open-concept our entire house and never have one moment of privacy or reprieve from the stacks of dirty pans at Thanksgiving. But I digress.
When we lost the convenient stocking-hanging ledge, I had a moment of panic--would Santa skip our house? The next year the stockings were around a window sill, and the following year draped over the back of the sofa, before I stumbled across a rustic ladder in an antique shop, and voila! We were set.
You may notice, though, the ladder is a bit crowded and this was just our nuclear family. Since then we've added a second green stocking (Lovely Girl#1) and a placeholder stocking (Lovely Girl#2, whose engagement came after my self-imposed I Cannot Finish ANY MORE PROJECTS deadline and will have a green stocking next year), and this year we'll have a temporary stocking for a favorite uncle who will spend Christmas with us.
So the Christmas Stocking Ladder tradition became the Christmas Stocking Door tradition. The remodel had meant we replaced a French door to a balcony with a more energy-efficient window and for years Husband had threatened to throw this door in the trash, but I'm pleased with its festivity and have discovered I don't really miss the ladder at all. The door, frankly, has a lot more room for expansion, and family expansion is (moral-of-the-story alert) is what the original Christmas was all about.
We grow, we change, we move into new phases of life and find they're just as joyful and full of meaning as the previous phases.
No matter what they look like, they all look a lot like Christmas.
You are just ahead of me on this path, and I really love getting glimpses of the near future. I have been wondering about this sort of thing recently, with my firstborn coming home from college for Christmas and me wondering how many more years we'll have him home sort of automatically, as opposed to by him making his own deliberate plans, and how the stockings will change with new family members, and so forth.
ReplyDeleteHmmm...I was going to reply, but the reply became post-length, so I'll put it up soon-ish. Thanks for asking--I still love reading your gift ideas for kids. I was very bad at this kind of thing.
Delete