My gift to the world: the blog resumes!
I apologize that the blog had to pause - this past semester was a whirlwind (think tornado), but Andrew and I persevered and the world as we know it is back to normal as we know it.
Andrew and I started a new tradition this year after the academic semester ended. We went to Galena for some R&R and Christmas shopping. We soaked in the hot tub and ate, drank, and ate some more. The best part of Galena was the stillness of the place. There's an ordinance against music being piped into the streets, so when we exited a shop, we'd be standing on a quiet, perfectly preserved street, the snow falling lightly, holding mittened hands...I couldn't believe how much I loved the sound of nothing at all. I nearly became obsessed with the silence.
Which brings me to the theme of this year. I've always loved the chaos of Christmas. I think part of it is that I've always been a week into vacation when Christmas arrives, so it's controlled chaos, and I've always loved the loudness and the frantic-ness. But this year, I started realizing what Christmas is like as an adult. The build-up is stressful and takes a lot out of you, and then it feels like a wedding - it goes by in a blink of an eye, and you're left trying to piece together all the fun moments.
I started realizing that I'd become (or am becoming) an adult when the way I've always felt about certain things at Christmastime were completely different this year.
The Tree
We love to cut our own tree. This year, we drove out to a farm in nowhere Iowa. It had sledding and saws and the smell of pine, and it had been snowing. It was awesome. We took mugs of hot chocolate with us. But by the time we'd cussed eachother out getting the tree into the stand, we'd both decided that next year, we'll be skipping the stress of chopping the darned thing down and just getting a half-dead pre-cut.
And decorations present a whole host of other issues. Last year, our decorations looked beautiful to me. This year? Well, a little tacky. We had the crazy idea to host a Christmas party on the 9th of January, so they're all staying up well past Epiphany this year, dead as a doornail tree and all. When I agreed to this in September, I thought I'd relish the extra 3 days of a decorated house (as good Episcopalians, NOTHING MOVES until Epiphany), but I have a feeling it's going to be a long 12 (and now, for us, 15) days of Christmas this year.
Gifts
Typically, I love planning and buying gifts. Last year, I made a ton of our gifts, and Andrew and I did service and donations as gifts and then wrote heartfelt letters to our parents about how they raised us well and with a conscience. This year, neither of us had the time to put into a gift like that, so we stuck to lists. I'm not really a fan of lists, I found. As I was frantically driving around town on a Friday night, figuring out which stores would be open at midnight and the roads were starting to freeze, I realized why people really dislike gift exchanges. The experience in Galena changed my mind a few days later (where we could pick out surprises and things that can't be found everywhere, and I did get to make a few gifts that I was proud to give!) but it was an odd feeling to find something that I typically love so much to be a harried, frustrating experience.
In terms of receiving gifts, I found that I received this bizarre adult enlightenment in the week before Christmas - surprises are the greatest thing ever. I should probably preface all of this by explaining that Andrew and my families spoil us. As in, really, really spoil us - and we always send out lists before Christmas because they're requested (but for the record, I do get very excited about the things on my list - just ask anyone who was around on the 26th about how much iced tea and water I sucked down out of the elusive Starbucks cup, or how much useless knowledge I proudly spout from Us Weekly, etc) but this was the first year that while I was embarrassingly excited to receive the items from the list that I'd compiled back in November, many of my favorite things were the most unexpected. This year, among my favorite unexpected gifts were a book from my dad and a neat little candle holder from Andrew's stepsister. I'm tempted to follow the lead of my brother-in-law and ditch the idea of lists - both for purchasing and receiving - altogether, which seems to me a very creepy reminder that I must be, at the tender age of 26, becoming an adult.
Going Home
This was the first year that we didn't spend our trip equal parts friends and family. Seeing family trumped, and our friends felt the same way about their families. But it's strange when home doesn't feel like home anymore - not seeing the same crew of friends from childhood (with a couple lovely exceptions) was a part of that, but there were other details that just bothered me a little bit too much. My hometown has a huge Walgreen's where I remember an un-lighted 4-way stop when I was young, and I didn't recognize any of the altar servers at church. As we sang hymns, I started doing mental math, and realized that the oldest altar server was eight years old when I graduated high school. No wonder I didn't recognize anyone. I realized that the people I remembered were aging, and they wouldn't be there forever. It dawned on me that there are probably only a few years left that I'll even go home for Christmas, since in five years or so, Andrew and I will probably want to have Christmas at home for the sake of a kid.
And that's where it got bittersweet. I think most people feel like their last Christmas "as a kid" is the one where they come home from college, or maybe the first one they share with a new family and the holiday traditions they had as a kid are disrupted a bit. When these things happened for me, I remember being a little stressed out, but excited because Christmas was just getting amped up - for the college homecoming one, my family discovered Bailey's because I was a "grown up," and when Andrew and I started dating, I got to add two phenomenally different sets of holiday traditions to add to my own, and the expansion of my family's trio to a quartet felt completely natural. And, after five years (I can't believe we've been celebrating Christmas together for five years) of this magical time of year, I've fallen into a child-like groove because I know what all the goodness of the season will be like. But this Christmas was the first one where it hit me like a brick that our Christmas traditions probably won't always stay the same - in fact, they really can't. But I wish they would.
Travel
Andrew and I returned to Iowa this afternoon on snow covered roads. We were supposed to host friends of ours for the night who were also traveling to see family, but they didn't make the trip due to the snow, and while I'm sad to miss them, it's been an exhausting and exhilarating week. In my old age, I'm really glad to be home - we have to pick up Morty at the boarding place tomorrow morning and I have a host of errands to run as a result of being gone for a week, and I am loathing the idea of getting back in the car, because I just feel like I've been in a car too much. It's weird to travel for the holidays, because I feel so torn on my return. While I miss family ridiculously, and I miss being at my old home, the "here" home is home. When we pulled into the drive, I realized that I'd been missing this place for days, and home feels really good.
Andrew and I are in the process of figuring out New Year's plans, and we've decided to put a moratorium on travel and be home by 10pm for a toast by ourselves. We really should just start wearing our pants at our ribcages now, I suppose.
The holidays as an old fogey are bittersweet. A week before Christmas, our priest (well, Bishop, but that's another story for another day) gave a sermon about how when you think of the experience of Mary, Christmas is actually very sad - it's about the day a baby was born to carry the weight of the world, and the book of Luke sums it up with "and Mary carried these things in her heart." I've heard those words a million times, but this year, they had a little bit of a haunting feel to them. On Christmas eve, the priest at my home parish dedicated midnight mass to the people who couldn't be with us this year, but wanted to. Maybe I just wasn't listening before, but it hadn't ever dawned on me that the extreme joy I always feel at Christmas is maybe because it's paired with just a little bit of sadness.
I will always love Christmas. I love the surprises, and the mystery, the food, the sparkle, the snow - and absolutely most of all I love spending Christmas with my family. I'm lucky that Andrew shares my giddiness about it all, and I hope we hold on to our child-like feelings about Christmas forever. There are some things about adulthood that I think I can learn to shake off or ignore - but I'm actually somewhat happy to have maybe grown up a little bit this year. There are things that I truly hadn't noticed, like how delightfully gaudy my mother-in-law's handmade stockings really are, and few things that I've taken for granted, like coming home to my parents' church. There were the new things - being a part of the sixteen-person crowd at Andrew's dad's house, which was the most delightfully over-the-top family Christmas I've ever experienced (seriously, it should have been documented with a film crew. We'd be more popular than The Office). This year, I became aware of it all - the stockings will not look like they're from Pottery Barn next year either, and when we return home again, I'll be even more of a stranger in my home parish, too. And, if we're honest, the odds of an entire family getting together again in less than 5 years is probably pretty slim. It's all a little sad from the perspective of an adult, but at least I've finally figured out how to pay closer attention and enjoy the moments as they come instead of looking forward to another Christmas next year, identical to this one.
Though Santa, if you're reading, I can't help but ask...please? Maybe just one more year, just like this?
