Epic shot by Kim Butan for Freezy Freakies
For the entirety of my adult life, the holiday season has more or less been spent in a weird dance of trying to recapture some tiny fragment of the magic I felt as a child, and mostly failing. I've come up with various traditions that I always think will help me get back some of that loopy joy - watching Elf with a Chinese food picnic on the living room floor; going full Christmas Explosion on our house; drinking hot chocolate whenever possible, et cetera - but...it's different. Of course it is.
When I was a kid, my parents always unplugged the tree at night to keep the place from burning down, but were apparently willing to risk an apartment fire on Christmas Eve, because every year I woke up before sunrise and ran out to the living room to find the tree aglow. Even when I was tiny, I always resisted the (overwhelming) desire to sprint into my parents' room and get them with the program for a few minutes, just so I could stand there in that perfect, sparkling quiet and feel...