Last weekend, we put on hats and scarves and headed over to Nyack in search of Christmas ornaments, because we only have a couple of weeks to go and I wanted to jump-start our family into a holiday kind of mood. We bought sparkly owls and ferocious lions, and then went home and hung them on our tree, and it was lovely. Not Christmas, exactly, not yet…but almost.
The thing is, these past few years I’ve had trouble getting into the Christmas spirit. Of course the magic you feel when you’re a kid dwindles away once you get into the whole Life As An Adult thing, that makes sense: but still…a little would be nice. The heart-flutter you get when you come down in the morning and see a lit-up tree. You know what I mean.
When I was a little girl, I’d spend the days leading up to Christmas Eve and Christmas morning trying to be as good as I possibly could. It started out because I didn’t want to risk Santa making a last-minute snap decision that I wasn’t deserving of that Garfield phone…but even after I began to suspect that the magical red-suited man might be a bit of a ruse, I kept on doing things like giving my mom hugs just because on Christmas Eve. Feeding our ten thousand animals before my parents got up on Christmas morning, so they wouldn’t have to jump into chores right when they came out of their bedroom. Bringing my dad coffee to try and put him into the best mood possible before he opened his stocking. Not because I was a saint of a child – I wasn’t – but because I think as I grew up I started to realize just how tenuous the magic is, just how easily it can fall to pieces completely. And I didn’t want it to.
Last year, Kendrick and I fought on Christmas Eve. It was a stupid fight, an unnecessary one – most of them are – but I let it last far beyond when it should have. It carried over into the morning, only broken when our son opened up the first present in his stocking – an Elmo toothbrush – and grinned at us, helping us remember why we were sitting around the tree in the first place.
Around the time I graduated from high school, I remember telling my mom that I was sad that Christmas felt like it had “gone away”, like I couldn’t get back to what made that time of year so exciting, so joyful – and I also remember what she told me: that it would be that way again, one day.
She was right.
This morning, I sat down with Indy to eat a bowl of cereal, alternating bites for him and me, and he wanted to see some “fishies,” so I found a YouTube video of fish swimming in an aquarium. (That’s really all they were doing; it was as thrilling as it sounds.) Eventually I could not watch one more second of very slowly swimming fish, and so I clicked over to that paragon of child-appropriate content, Perez Hilton…and came upon this video, which is really just an ad for an airline, but which is so beautiful and brilliantly done that it had me in tears about one minute in, once I realized where the ad was headed.
When the video came to an end, my son smiled at the screen and – I swear – said, “Christmas.” I hadn’t even known that he knew the word.
And, with that: it was.
Is.
For the first time in a long time.
On me: Leather detail scarf c/o Amber Kane (RG readers get 20% off using code Ramshackle); INC mixed-media colorblock shirt (on sale for $27) and jeans; Hat Attack fedora; UGG combat boots.
