Today, after a month of grey and rain, the sun peeked out over the green hills.
I drove the length of road home from dropping my youngest off at school for the first day following her Christmas break, and the sight of everything so different suddenly,
made it almost feel like Christmas had never even existed at all;
Back to school, and the same old decor, back to our old routes, and now weirdly echoey feeling home – I tried to frame it to myself as a reminder that even when so much around us is shifting, there will always be a bit of sameness again, if you look for it, and that is exactly what this Christmas had been about:
What changes, and what remains.
Christmas break brought me lots of big feelings this year.
My middle two daughters are seniors, rarely home. They breeze in and out, wafting behind them soft scents of their perfume, telling me a schedule I can never seem to remember, and then, again, they’re gone.
The youngest is in middle school, and when it comes to attitude and eye-rolls, she has chosen to fully dive in. It’s like the hormones pulled up in a convertible beside my sweet little baby, and called to her, “Get in, Girl. Let’s go!”
As I sat up late surrounded by twinkle lights every night over the break, alone,
I found myself often scrolling my phone, rewatching old Christmas memory recordings, like a dog circling, circling, looking for a place to curl that felt comfortable.
The girls in their footie pajamas, with sing-songy voices, everything still bright, and fun…
I felt overtaken by the passing of time because of grainy present opening videos.
This year I felt the shift heavily when I realized that for the very first year ever we hadn’t left Santa a plate of cookies.
I never said anything about it. No one else noticed. I just opened the cabinet door to put a bowl away one day, and I blinked at it;
Like an old friend who felt my pain.
A Velveteen Rabbit of Christmas Things,
That poor old Santa Cookie plate never moved from our cupboard.
I marked in my invisible Mom Diary, “2024 was the first year without the plate.”
It was hard to feel as festive this year.
I felt stressed, and things felt rushed.
The mom on the couch late at night felt tricked, I guess, because the magic had failed to warn her that it would be moving on.
I didn’t mean to carry these feelings, but I think my arms just felt empty without the little girls in those videos,
so I carried them to Christmas morning, where they would go off like a bomb.
Everyone wants holidays to feel perfect.
We put so much pressure on them,
and we don’t talk enough about the times when they simply don’t.
Sometimes it’s money, sometimes it’s circumstance, sometimes you’re missing someone.
The ache inside me of wanting just one thing in my life to feel the same bled out through tears that day to my girls.
They were blinking and distant, at first, though,
and for a little while I felt like a dried up mom in a dumb Christmas apron,
all alone in the crumbling world.
But then we decided to do what needed to be done,
and we sat and talked about changes we each would like to see in our family, and in our traditions.
We accepted each person’s viewpoint. In a revolutionary move, we didn’t get defensive.
It was a moment in time I’ll never forget, when I faced the fact that, though I want my girls to stay small, and unchanged, they ARE changing, and it’s OK for me to change, too:
They would never leave me, really, if I would grow with them.
We decided to change some ways we do things that day, and shift some long-held traditions.
I was astounded how much the letting go felt like peace.
It feels so good sometimes to let yourself exhale the breath you hold.
That evening, as something else that was new, we went on a walk along the trail by our house, after our talk was done, and we came upon a little new tree out there in the wild someone had put some decorations on, then a little further up ahead, we saw a sweeping oak tree, surely hundreds of years old, covered in moss.
I held both trees in my heart together, and while they were there I thought about the fact that old and new can exist in the same place.
We can love the things we loved, unchanged in our memories, growing love on them like moss, and we can love the new little tree that shows up on our path, begging us to see things a way we never saw.
The new little tree might look much different from the old one,
but it just hasn’t had the time to grow into something yet.
Everything in the world begs for time.
This year, I think my biggest gift was the reminder that
newness can exist side-by-side in the same forest as something that
has been there all along.
