Like most people, I love Christmas. I maybe don't love it as much as my friend Lori, who starts counting down the days to it long about the time roadside fireworks stands start popping up in June. Lori puts her tree up when I am finishing dividing up my kids' Halloween candy. (Girl Child's bag, Boy Child's bag, Mommy's bag. Shhhh!)
I manage to wait until Thanksgiving week to start getting out our trees. Yes, that's right, I said trees. We have three. Okay, five if you count the trees in the kids' rooms. Okay, seven if you count the one in the backyard playhouse and the kids' favorite, the one with the.....(insert positive adjective, you can do it).....*bright* multi-colored lights and all the homemade ornaments that I keep (hide) in our finished basement. But those other four don't count because they are four foot trees, and a tree has to be at least a six-footer to count, right? Fine, we have seven trees.
So there's the "Gold tree", the "Silver tree", the "Family tree", "Barbie tree" (GC's room), "Sports tree" (BC's room), "Playhouse tree" and "Hideous....er, I mean....Basement tree". If you have to ask what's with all the trees, you won't get it even if I try and splain it.
You also won't get the garland over the archways and doorways, the candlelit wreaths in every window, the icicle lights on the house AND the playhouse, the collection of thirty nutcrackers (which by the way, I do hereby bequeath to my friend Julie-who is terrified of nutcrackers-in the event that I precede her in death), the family of reindeer in the yard and the jingle bells on every door.
Goodness knows even my own Handsome Husband doesn't get it. He made some noises here and there when he got sucked into the Christmas vortex ten plus years ago, but time and the futility of protest have resigned him to bobbing along the sea of lights and garland from mid-November through the first of the new year.
The process of setting up all of the magic takes about three days and twenty (wo)man hours. I'm the first to admit that each year I have to give myself a little internal pep talk to get started. I head to the storage area of the basement, survey the forty-odd boxes and tubs and pause a second waiting for the phone to magically ring.
If it did indeed ring, it would be the producers from HGTV's "Celebrity Holiday Homes" calling to say, "Hey! This year instead of showcasing the homes of three celebrities who could hire our designers in a hot minute to do all of the thousands of dollars of decorating that we do for them for free, we are featuring three average American homes of people who couldn't afford to pay any of our designers to spend five minutes spinning one of their $40 spools of ribbon into a bow! And you're one of the winners!!"
And then reality snaps me back from that fantasy faster than Sabrina Soto's glue gun working on a pine cone wreath, and it's just me and the tubs and the boxes. But sometime between the first tub and the fifth, I throw the Christmas music on, and I come alive. I'm hanging and fluffing and tying and singing, and Christmas decor starts to fill the house and the Christmas spirit starts to fill my heart.
Now please don't ruin all this magic and cheer by asking me what I think of houses with blow up lawn decor and Christmas lights kept on until spring and beyond. I don't want anyone throwing shade on my decorations, so I am not throwing any on theirs. Decorate the way that makes you happy, happy, happy as Phil Roberston would say. Do yo thang. Jack it up, rev it up, light it up, blow it up, dress it with some sparkles, spray paint and even that canned fake snow if it makes you stand back and say, "MERRY CHRISTMAS!! GOD BLESS US EVERYONE!" or something a little more low key, but just as heartfelt.
This is the one time of the year when more than 11% of the people you encounter out and about are in a good mood. Foster it, grow it, spread it. Tell people "Merry Christmas!", smile at little kids (which you should be doing anyway BTW) grab your girlfriends and go caroling. If you can't sing, rap! Nothing better than a group of middle-aged white girls trying to put their back into rapping "Twas the Night Before Christmas". See, you're picturing it, and you're smiling!
Find your Christmas spirit however you can, whether it's through decorating your house, baking cookies with your kids, or picturing childhood Christmases with people you love who are now long gone. Grab it when and where you can, and then hold onto it. Let it whisper to you after the decorations are down, through the cold winter months, growing again in the spring, and carrying you throughout the year.
Even the Scroogiest of Scrooges can find a little Christmas cheer if they try and also realize that in one way or another, most of us are very blessed. I'll bet if you even asked my Handsome Husband and got him to admit his deepest and truest thoughts, he'd tell you that despite my procrastination interventions (which he sometimes oddly calls nagging), once all the lights are lit, he likes coming home to our own version of the Grizwald Old-Fashioned Family Christmas. I know I do.
Sparkly Kisses,
D
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