Christmas is coming / the goose is getting fat
So, Christmas.
I don’t especially like it as holidays go. I do like the reason/excuse to be nice to people: bring them cookies (this year the cookie bake fest is ON! Yes!) and give gifts and even, maybe, send cards although I find writing the personal notes and putting the stamps on overwhelming as a whole project (individual cards though, when I’m doing them, I like).
But the shadow of abuse falls over it. Well, let’s be frank. Not just that most Christmases of my/our youth was I being abused, I was also almost inevitably sick with pneumonia (not necessarily unrelated events). And then after that was over with, my mother kept having these nightmare celebrations where she’d reminisce on great past holidays (did I mention abuse?!) and forget about The Christmas My Parents Had Kicked My Sister Out Of The House and all those kinds of things.
The whole tree/nativity/gifts thing can send me into a spin. Some people, like Lynn, have very dark memories and spend the time in that tense abuse anniversary fog. Some people, like Lyr and I, get tired out (not necessarily in a bad way) trying to get good stuff to everyone we love (and never succeeding). And some of the kids in the system really want the fairytale Santa Christmas (which Carl has occasionally pulled off, bless him).
Then of course there’s the latest round of memories: Christmas pregnant with Emily and sick with a cold; moving out from our house with all our stuff into storage on Dec 23 of the year she died and then spending Christmas Eve in the IBM parking lot and on the road to Ottawa; and then last year.
Also - and this is terrible from someone who made such a fuss about a gift last year - I am uncomfortable with it being super commercial. I love the exchange of gifts. I hate the idea of consumer debt over it. I’m not really sure what a good way to balance it out is. And Noah’s birthday showed how overwhelming it can get with kids, really quickly (although I think everyone is adhering to my wishes about not going overboard, at least).
The thing is.
It’s not about me any more.
Ohhhh this year we can get away with not observing the full ritual, but this is probably the very last year we can. It’s truly time to start considering what I would like Christmas to be like for Noah and working to make that happen. Have a tree, or not? Santa and stockings? baby Jesus, or just emphasize Rudolph and The Grinch? Or go counter cultural? Lean towards Buy Nothing Christmas, or do something mid-range, or solve a lot of angst by throwing money at it?
Festivus?
One thing I know I want to do is some schmalzy volunteer thing - hand out turkey at a soup kitchen or deliver carols with Meals on Wheels or something. I know, I know, it often seems overdone to do it once a year. But when Carl and I were working together and we did the Meals on Wheels thing, we saw that people really were - glad. Not only that, but it made such a good break in the day to be truly grateful, to get out and serve someone else rather than sit at home counting gifts. Preferably on the day itself, but if not, around then.
Other than that, I’m really not sure. I would like to do a little decorating, but not too much. The baking is really the core of our system’s celebrating, and Noah can join in with that (even this year!). But do I want him to make a wish list for Santa? Do I want to go to church? Do I want to get kids’ books all about it? I really don’t know. I’m going to be interviewing the people behind Buy Nothing Christmas and I’m really seriously thinking of whether our family should go in that direction.
Any thoughts out there?
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For a lot of odd reasons, we had to do the whole ‘build a Christmas tradition out of nothing’ thing for our family. In some ways I hate it, I always loved Christmas with my family and wanted Molly to experience that. In other ways it’s great because the memories she’ll eventually have around Christmas will be ones that are built around the three of us together, without any fakeness or trying to impress the neighbors.
I decorate pretty minimally, mostly because our apartment won’t take much. No room for a tree, etc. Instead we’ve got a red wagon she was given when she was born, we fill that with gifts and hang stockings and I put up a few other decorations, just to have the pretty lights.
For gifts we do mostly books. J and I are both big readers, and there are always plenty of books on our wish lists, so there’s no worry about ‘just get Dad a tie’ or ‘Would Mom like this muffin tin?’ And it makes me really happy to see Molly’s library slowly filling up with books that the people around her loved when they were children, inscribed and lined up and waiting for her to discover them too.
This year we really want to get her these cool wooden blocks we found, but other than that she’ll get books and so will we. We have a few favorite Christmas movies to watch, and I put out a spread of food that combines my mother’s traditional Christmas buffet with food that J and I like.
It’s a very low-key Christmas, but I like it that way. Once I got away from my mother’s mindset enough to realize that there’s nobody I have to impress or satisfy with our holidays other than me, J, and Molly it all got so much clearer.
I don’t know what “but nothing” is but I assume it’s not doing gifts. If so, I think that’s a rough way to go for a kid. I think of the kids I went to school with and how they got left out of so much because of that. It really ostrasized(sp?) them.
But I also think what my mom did works too. She bought lots of educational gifts (books and such like Briar said) and magazine subscriptions that became increasingly more grown up as I grew up. And I got those _all year!_ which was cool. So educational stuff vs. toys where you have more fun with the box.
I think some tradition is always good. We used to buy one christmas tree ornament every year too. Just to help remember each year. That sort of thing.