Christmas is pressing on me.
What I mean is that the pressure of Christmas is getting to me, but upon closer examination (and, as an introspective, navel-gazing type, I love closer examinations, though I need reading glasses for them these days) I can see that I’m the one creating the pressure, grasping Christmas with both hands and pulling it to myself then complaining that it’s all too much.
I remember Christmases filled with presents, family, and joy. The space just before Christmas, on Christmas Eve (the holiest night of the year, IMHO), became a sacred and still one, pregnant with anticipation. Appropriately, I suppose.
Now I want to recreate that magic and sacredness for The Kid and Little Brother (and even Kevin the Dog, about whom I just stressed as I came home from The Final Shop, fretting over whether the four bags of treats I bought for his stocking would be enough to make him happy. Someone help me). And seeing as how, the last few years, we’ve dragged them all over the globe at Christmastime, and spent most of our Christmas Eves in hotel rooms, the sacredness and stillness have been sorely lacking.
But this year we will wake up in our own home. To our own tree. And they will run down their own stairs, and I want the scene that greets them to be…everything.
It won’t be, of course. Like the hot chocolate LB has been begging to have for breakfast, it will disappoint in one way or another, will be something other than expected in some manner. Expectations are just unfulfilled disappointments, right? But that hasn’t stopped me from trying.
Trying, and tiring.
The week before Christmas that began with surgery has continued with sickness: The Husband’s, and that of a gastric variety, which has left me resentful of the shared-load-changed-to-my-load, and thinking things (or possibly saying them under my breath) like “Two C-sections and I was up the next day, nobody gave ME a break” or “Must be nice to not have to parent with the flu, I WOULDN’T KNOW.” I’ve been resentful and bitter and exhausted, and at times the mood has been…tense.
Oh, and also? We’ve been in lockdown. Again. Because an Australian version of a COVID outbreak is a dozen cases, and an Australian response to such an outbreak is swift and, hopefully, effective.
It’s sort of like being stuck in a hotel room.
So here I am, face-to-face with all my limitations and those of the world around me, and isn’t that the perfect time for Christmas to show up and tell me that I can’t make it happen? Because Christmas, like grace, happens on its own and in its own way and through no effort of mine–the parts of it that matter most, at least. And they happen better.
Because scattered throughout the limitations are the unforced moments of magic: the piling up of the four of us in one bed to watch a Christmas movie; the proclamation by LB that “Jesus looks like a girl but she’s a man;” the initially-impromptu-but-now-oft-repeated water balloon attack on the boys; the moments I get to sneak away downstairs with a glass of wine and watch White Christmas. And, you know, whatever else is in store…she wrote, as her husband drove to the doctor’s office to drop off a shit sample.
I’ve found myself hanging by a thread and come to realise that I don’t have to hang because I am carried by Christmas. I come with my limitations, and it comes with its grace. With its unexpectedness. This Christmas will not look like the others–it wasn’t meant to.
And so we wait, with trepidation and anticipation, in grief and and love, to find out what that means.