Christmas has come and gone again for another year. It can seem, even with it starting way before Thanksgiving, that I didn’t have a chance to stop and properly celebrate. I think CDF is feeling it too. It’s hard to know exactly what was missed, since it’s just a general feeling of “it didn’t feel like Christmas this year.”
I think some of the problem is that we expect Christmas to be celebrated for us, like it was when we were children, and we’d just go along for the ride. Now I don’t want to go overboard and fall into the grip of a manic compulsion to celebrate Christmas for MDF. But I do have a feeling that we should start celebrating our own traditions. We’re doing that with the tradition of driving around and looking at Christmas lights, but there needs to be more.
We also need to find traditions that will help us slow down and appreciate, as well as anticipate, the holiday. This year we might have just done things to do them. Such as decorating outside. Next year we should take our time to plan how we want to decorate, and then decorate for the enjoyment of it, not just because we feel we have to.
We could bake more. Not because we have to make a bunch of stuff to give away. But bake to celebrate the holiday. Bake things that are fun to mix up. Cookies that are fun to make and decorate.
Really, it’s spending time together doing things that make the Christmas holiday special. What we do is not as important, except that it needs to be things that we only do during Christmas time.
In spite of all the above, I still enjoyed this Christmas. It was MDF’s first Christmas being able to open and enjoy gifts, and that was a lot of fun to be a part of.