Making Christmas
A seven foot white pine Christmas tree, grown at the Kroeger’s family tree farm from which you pick it up, freshly cut for you, baled, and drilled plumb for a tree stand is $59, which I believe is an excellent deal. We went to get ours yesterday and marveled at the difference a year makes with Essie. Last year, Ess was in the Björn, reacting a tiny bit to things, and generally kind of just along for the ride. This year she is 16 months old and far more interactive: riding on my back in the Kelty, reaching out at trees she likes, drinking sips of apple juice in the warming house, beaming at people she sees. The long-needled trees like our white pine feel soft to the hand, and, as with anything she feels that is thick and soft, Ess says “maoww”, meaning that it feels just like her cat at home.
I popped the tree into its stand as Mykala put Ess down for her nap. In years past, we would get the tree, put on the lights, put on the decorations, do it all at once in one marathon decoration session. This year, by necessity, we do a little Christmas at a time. Some decorations one day, the tree another, the lights today. We consider things like strands of lights without lead in them to be far more important than we ever did before. We take precautions against Ess knocking over the tree or drinking the tree water. It is a lot to think about, and that extra mental overhead, the thinking of someone else before you, is the next stage of Christmas we are growing into.
Mykala and I were talking a few days ago and we agreed that there’s a point where Christmas loses some of its highlight-of-the-year quality; sometime between high school and the end of college. Your peer group expands, you start interacting with the world differently, your mind and efforts are distracted by an entire other social sphere, even when you are home with family at Christmas. Your attention is divided. Then, out of school and into a job, before you have kids, and there’s this odd feeling of remembering how special Christmas was, but realizing it will never be that way for you again. For the first time, it is tinged with a little melancholy, if only a little. Then, as suddenly as something so profound can happen, you jump into the world of parenting and your attention turns to your little one, and your efforts become about making their Christmas the highlight of their year. It has been said and described by a thousand authors and observers, but you really do see the season through the freshness, the newness of your children’s eyes. It is something you read about, but a quite a bit more memorable and lovely to experience yourself. It makes the child-proofing of the Christmas decorations incidental, just a little speed bump on the way to your non-stop efforts to make the world a gentle, special, loving place for your children as long as you can.