Two nights before Christmas there is a lot of energy in this household no matter how old my kiddos get.
There might be attempts at…
- Christmas poetry
- Christmas baking
- Christmas altruism
- Christmas shopping
There is Christmas background music from Spotify or one of my girls tap tap tapping on the piano: Santa Claus is coming to town…
There are petitions for Advent (not sure it’s the Scripture readings or the miniature chocolates they’re after).
Are they excited?
Are they preoccupied?
Mwahahaha.
Even the mountains are spreading their cheer.
My home appears to be competing for a snow globe ribbon, sheltered in the protective glass ball of the Kootenay mountains.
“On the night before Christmas, all through the house,
all the people were stirring, even the mouse…
So I went to the lawn and in a moment,
I had fallen asleep…
Until I woke up and looked at the sky.
It was tinted dark blue with no cloud to be seen, but to my amazement,
there was Saint Nick, with a couple fa la las, and a couple of ho ho hos.
He looked at me wide-eyed, with a bottle of Joe…”
–one of my kids
Though we are enjoying many Christmas activities and hosting many events, baking nearly every day, skiing right outside our front door every afternoon, and shopping up a storm, Christmas is changing in our household, just as the kiddos are growing up.
Signs that Christmas is changing:
My twelve-year-old made the reheated Christmas dinner last year for Christmas day.
Official Christmas dinner in our home is on Christmas Eve…leftover prime rib and blue cheese biscuits…wearing comfy socks and PJs, not picking up gift wrap, instead, wandering from one kid to the next in their reverie, then plopping down with the hubby to read a new book.
I didn’t buy one Mattel product last year.
I’ve been purchasing Mattel since 2003. That would make almost a dozen years.
Bye-Bye Barbie.
We finally entered the Lego era in 2009. I’m pretty sure I have a few more years to purchase Legos still.
The kids have been more excited about giving their gifts than receiving them.
Creating their own board games or sugar scrubs, or purchasing gifts that family members really would love, like a map of where we’ve traveled or make-up products and lip balms.
Everyone is moving the Elf, except our youngest kiddo.
I do it for the twinkle in these eyes.
Our eldest kiddo wants to skip certain family traditions to accommodate sleepovers.
Say what?
My family traditions can’t go into perpetuity?
I think I can insist on most of my family traditions still because she is not yet sixteen. But heading to the big city to visit a good friend for a week after Christmas, without me…where has her childhood gone?
Christmas changes, but no matter what form it takes, Christmas is a gift, a God came-down grace kinda gift.
“I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of Peace on Earth, Good-Will to men!”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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