Once upon a time, December was the busiest month of the year.
- Holiday parties – my husband’s work, my work, our daughter’s school
- Gifts – making a list (and checking it twice), buying, wrapping, personally delivering or shipping
- Christmas cards – buying, writing the end-of-year-family newsletter, addressing, buying postage, mailing
- Cooking – planning the menus, making a grocery list (also checking it twice) purchasing the ingredients, cooking, serving
- Decorating – pulling decorations out of storage, repairing the damaged, purchasing new
- Miscellaneous traditions – driving around to see Christmas lights, baking and delivering cookies for first responders, attending Christmas Eve service
My fingers are tired from typing this. At the time it was fun. We love putting on ugly Christmas sweaters, gathering with friends and family and coworkers and celebrating the season, right? Or do we just love the idea of it? We downplay the stress of its reality. Our brains exhausted from holiday office party small talk. Our savings account spent on gifts for neighbors we barely know. Our cupboards bare from constantly replenishing the buffet at our extended family’s feast. Our vision of the perfect holiday is rarely realized since we can’t control the players, and this holiday season, there isn’t much of anything we can control.
During our first holiday season in Georgia, my husband was a worship leader, our daughter was in elementary school, and I was a teacher’s aide. By the morning of Christmas Eve, all three of us were exhausted from, well, see the list above. Working multiple Christmas Eve services, my husband was unavailable from early morning until late evening. Our daughter and I attended the first service. We grabbed tins of cookies the congregation baked for first responders on our way out. In the car, we ordered pizza before leaving the parking lot. By the time we dropped off the cookies at the firehouse located between the church and the restaurant, our pizza was waiting for us at the drive-thru. We got home and put on our jammies (it was only about 1:00PM, btw). I found White Christmas on TV. We ate pizza. We sang “Happy Birthday” to Jesus, blew out the candles on His cake, and ate slices for Him. We napped. When my husband got home, we repeated the process. We watched Christmas movies, stuffed our faces, and napped for the next 24 hours. Christmas Day ended with a drive through a local coffee shop for lattes and hot chocolate and meandering through neighboring subdivisions to look at their Christmas lights on the way back home. We did not answer the phone or check social media the entire time. It was the most relaxed the three of us had been since Thanksgiving. When the next year rolled around our daughter asked if we could do it again. I dubbed it “cocooning” and it became a tradition for the rest of our Georgia residency.
Several of our holiday activities aged out. I no longer send a year-end family newsletter. I refer everyone to social media. Email makes sending season’s greetings both quick and inexpensive. Because of COVID-19, more traditions are canceled this year and if I’m honest, I’m sorry, not sorry. We have plenty of options to cocoon. We can:
- have food delivered either from our grocery to make our favorite treats, or from a local restaurant. If we order through a food delivery service, we keep a local driver employed
- stream most any Christmas movie ever made
- have decorations and jammies delivered from a local department store
- stream holiday music playlists from our chosen service
- send a cookie gift basket to our nearest firehouse through a local bakery
- watch our church’s Christmas Eve service on their website
- make our own lattes and hot chocolate and tour neighborhood Christmas light displays from our couch thanks to YouTube (For my Dayton, Ohio friends, you can see the old Rike’s holiday windows virtually)
This global crisis has given us a holiday gift: a reason to celebrate small. Do you usually:
- travel 312 miles to stay with the in-laws? Can’t this year; COVID
- spend hundreds of dollars on gifts? Can’t this year; COVID
- attend your partner’s office holiday party? Can’t this year; COVID.
The pandemic has taken people we love, employment we need, and freedoms we cherish away from us. But, it has given us a reason to stop, be grateful for what we still have, and act on it. Let’s celebrate through our words and (maybe virtual) presence the people we’ve leaned on, both personally and professionally, to get through 2020. Isn’t that the essence of the holidays? Making sure people know how much we appreciate them?
How are you adjusting your holiday celebrations this year? Please share in the comments.