With just three weeks until Christmas, my favorite consumer holiday, I am a little bit blue. In the seventeen years I have lived on my own I have only had a tree once. Do not mistake me for a Scrooge kind of woman, I love decorating for the holidays. I come from a family where every room, including the bathroom, was carefully and laboriously decorated each year. My own failing in this area is largely because I have lived in apartments and always traveled at the holidays. It’s just not as charming to take the time to lovingly pick out and decorate a tree if you’re not there to enjoy it and come home to dead needles all over the floor. No, in my house Christmas is a transient holiday, one that I travel to, not one that exists at home. If I were the religious type this would be the perfect opportunity to make the Christian wet dream come true and put “Christ” back in Christmas, but instead I choose to ignore all the religious implications and focus on baking and shopping. Sorry baby Jesus.
It’s not that I don’t want to decorate, I’ve been lugging around boxes full of decorations for the entire 17 years, but in the most recent years I’ve foregone even opening them. What I do enjoy is the baking and wrapping of gifts. I’m what you might call an obsessive holiday baker. Since the tree thing and decorations have fallen off, I put all my energy into baking and if I don’t get to bake, it’s not Christmas. A dozen different cookies, two types of coffee cake, six varieties of candy . . . screw the tree, the baked goods are the heart of the holiday. My other great love is wrapping gifts. I love the tissue, the variety of wrapping, bows, ribbons, sharp scissors and the blessed invention for all good gift wrappers: double sided tape. It was never so much the tree on its own that made it Christmas, it was the sight of all the carefully gift-wrapped presents underneath and the many platters of cookies and candy.
This year, however, I am missing the tree. Not sure why after so many years it’s now weighing on me, maybe I am just ready to settle in my own home for the holidays. The annual pilgrimage home to celebrate with family for the week means I am never quite able to just be at home. I want to be cooking and baking on Christmas Eve. I want to sit in my living room aglow from the lights on the tree and burning candles. I love my family and when I don’t get to spend the holiday with them I miss it terribly, but I hate being gone the entire week and forfeiting my own holiday traditions. In some ways I feel like I am stuck at the kiddie table, just waiting until I can graduate to the same traditions all the grown-ups celebrate. There’s no tree, no wrapped gifts, and no kids up at the crack of dawn excitedly begging for it to be time to open presents. All my memories of Christmas remain just that and I’m ready to start making some holiday memories of my own.
No comments:
Post a Comment