the spirit of christmas, where is it?
ah, the holidays, when we all find magic in the little things. god i love humanity
I do not believe in God, but Christmas has a funny way of making me into a believer in something. The good of people? The magic of the season? The joy of strangers flocking together for celebration?
As the years go by I find it harder and harder to find the “spirit of Christmas”, so to speak, within myself. Something that was once so natural has become a muscle I need to strengthen through practice and resilience.
As a kid I counted down the days until Christmas with vigour, starting as early as the middle of November. My mother and I would bake sugar cookies in all the festive shapes: reindeer, Santa Claus, snowflakes. My brother and I would stay up as late as we could to try to hear Santa’s sleigh on our roof, trying to shush our giggles to not alert our mother that we were up past our bedtime.
I’ve begun to wonder if we outgrow that sort of innocent joy. If the holidays become something to dread rather than look forward to. Family obligations, corporate holiday parties, presents that break the bank.
As a kid, I couldn’t imagine ever feeling any sort of dread for the holidays. It was a time of joy, magic, sappy movies and late-night baking.
It’s true, I’m not immune to the feelings of sombre that I think creep up on every adult during this time of the year. It can be stressful to carve out time to find and secure the perfect gifts, celebrate with friends, and still have a few seconds leftover to enjoy the season with yourself.
So, is the spirit of Christmas dead?
Or maybe … have we just grown up?
Admittedly, I don’t have much exposure to children, my brother and I are the youngest in our family and we’re both well in our 20’s, so I can’t provide evidence for my claims. But I have a feeling that the excitement I once felt as a kid is still alive and rumbling within every youngling during this month.
And if the kids still got it, how come we lost it?
When did we become the grumpy adults we used to poke fun at as children?
In all honesty, I don’t think the magic of the season is dead. We might have just gotten a bit lazy and overwhelmed. It takes an active effort nowadays to get into the spirit.
I remember one Christmas Eve, one of the first spent with just our mother, my brother and I forced ourselves to fall asleep after we swore we heard Santa’s sleigh and reindeer on the roof of our townhouse. It was the first house we moved into after our parent’s divorce.
The only plus of having divorced parents is getting to have two Christmases, as the teachers at school liked to remind us.
We woke up the three of us, as we always did, my brother and I forcing our poor mother awake at 7 am sharp because Christmas morning was not a time to sleep in. As we all made our way down the stairs we noticed our mom’s fancy camera had been knocked off the fireplace. It was laying lens up on the carpet.
My mother gasped, my brother and I wide-eyed, about to go on a tangent that we didn’t do it when she said “It must have been Santa! It was right on the fireplace! He must have knocked it over when he was coming down the chimney.”
We gasped! We nodded.
Yes, it must have been Santa. As we looked around the living room, full of presents and an empty plate which had a pile of cookies set high the night before, there was no other logical explanation; Santa knocked over the camera.
She picked it up, turned it on and gasped, almost dropping the camera again. My brother and I hurried over to the couch, where she’d gone to sit, as if what she’d seen on the small screen was too much to take in standing up.
“Look!” She exclaimed, my brother and I shoving ourselves onto either side of her.
What we saw changed our lives.
She pressed through photos, explaining that they must have been taken by accident when Santa knocked the camera off the ledge.
The shutter had gone off and snapped several photos. These photos showed different angles of Santa’s boots as he walked from the chimney to the living room, another caught an angle of his glove, and a final couple showed the cut of his pants, long and red, cuffed with white fur. His face never revealed, but he was there, in these photos.
We couldn’t believe it! We had proof of his existence, right there in my mother’s hands. She shook her head, “Wow, we better keep this between us, huh? He’s a pretty secretive person.”
We all agreed: we’d keep the photos just for us, and we wouldn’t expose his small mistake to the world. It would be a family secret, evidence we would pass down to prove his existence.
Even as we got older and started to get teased for still believing in Santa long past our peers, the magic of that Christmas morning lingered in us, making us firm believers even as the other kids grew out of it. A secret my brother and I had against the rest of the world.
Even now, after all these years, I hold on to that bit of magic, that bit of believing.
Every year, my mother would get us whatever popular toy we had asked for, fighting other middle-aged women in the aisles of Toys“R”Us to make sure we’d have it on Christmas morning, but I think the magic of that Christmas was the greatest gift she ever gave us.
So, even if finding the magic of the season might take a bit more effort than it did as a kid, I’m confident it’s buried somewhere still, in all of us. We may just need to look a bit harder for it.
These are some of my personal rules for living through winter.
The advice I have for the holiday season in particular:
i. Bring a couple of bottles of wine to every holiday obligation
ii. Eat like shit without thinking about it
iii. For those who celebrate Christmas, pretend Santa is real
iv. Find a bit of magic in the little things
Enjoy this photo of me absolutely losing it after getting this DS organiser for Christmas one year.
It’s been a long month chat. I look forward to writing to you all in 2024. Take care of yourselves and your loved ones.
Signing off xo
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Until next month …