The very first week of January could quite possibly be my favorite time of the year. It's a fresh start to a new year. It's 300 days until we have to deal with the holidays again. It should be 330 days, but thanks to retail America, we get Christmas shoved down our throats sometime around Halloween.
I love the idea of the holidays. The family time, a reason to annihilate the kitchen, an excuse to drink to excess. I love Christmas lights hung outside. I love lying to small children about Santa. I like peppermint flavored things and pumpkin pie. There are plenty of reasons to love the holidays.
Problem is, almost all of the good stuff gets buried in the nonsense of the season. There's Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer playing at Target before Thanksgiving. There's advertising galore, slick newspaper inserts filled with Chinese crap. The obligations to buy buy buy. It feels like one big retail orgy and we Americans are all too willing to participate.
This year was our first Christmas back in the house. Before, when we were living on the boat, Christmas caused me major anxiety. We had no spare room for extra stuff. The kid's toys were already taking up much of our minimal storage space. And then bam! Christmas and three sets of grandparents and a great-grandmother and aunts and uncles and everybody wanting to buy him toys and even right this second I can feel myself hyperventilating just thinking about it. It's not like he got tons of stuff, but when you have nowhere to put the stuff you already have and then have to make room for more stuff...well. It's stressful.
We didn't decorate much on the boat. We'd hang a few strands of lights on the lifelines around the deck. We'd buy a rosemary plant shaped like a Christmas tree and decorate it with felted elves and strings of cranberries and keep it on our table. I'd use the rosemary in stews and meat pies all winter long. We'd use our own wool socks for stockings. We started a tradition of making Mexican food for Christmas dinner. Chile verde and fresh tortillas and margaritas. It was all simple and relaxing. No fuss.
This was our first Christmas in a house in five years. I could've bought a tree, a tree skirt, a star for the tree, lights, garland, stockings. We could have had a wreath for the front door, poinsettias for the entry. We could've bought our kid fifty presents, because now he has room for them all. He wanted an Xbox. He wanted a TV. His friends got both. He got a microscope, which he needed for school anyway.
Instead of a tree we bought some Scotch pine seeds and we're attempting to grow a tree from scratch. We have a Vanderwulf pine out back and we made garland from popcorn and cranberries and draped it over the branches. The squirrels loved us for it. Kiddo cut out some paper snowflakes and we hung them on the windows. His stocking was a beanie he was getting as a gift anyway. Jon bought me a fire pit. I bought him a bottle of scotch. We sat outside around the fire pit. A light snow was falling. Kiddo wore his beanie. Hubs sipped his scotch. Chile verde simmered in the crockpot. We enjoyed the season for what it is: A time to hunker down with family, with the people you love most. A time to enjoy each other. To appreciate the little things.
Winter is for staying inside, staying warm. It's a time to catch up on reading, to play games, think quiet thoughts, take a deep breath from summer. But instead we run around like a bunch of mad fools, shopping, shopping, shopping because it's what's expected of us. It's what we're supposed to do. Stress out, make ourselves sick, over-plan, over-spend, fill our homes with junk.
I propose the fire pit. The scotch. Let's take back December and celebrate the season in a meaningful way.
Three hundred days left. Enjoy your year.
