Yesterday, as I strung lights around our tree, a task I loathe, it occurred to me that I must have been the Christmas grownup at least 30 times in my life. Which is to say, either hosting at my house, or in charge of a big chunk at my mother’s. (As I’m not Superwoman, I’m sure I outsourced it more than once, hence 30 even though my oldest child is now 35.)
To heck with metrics. I said yesterday, as I taped over a broken bulb, “I finally know how to do this.” In sum:
A Christmas Veteran Tells You What She Wishes She Had Known 30 Years Ago
- Invest in storage. Day one. Those ornament boxes with little compartments are great for ornaments and I recommend winding your light strings around old wrapping paper tubes.
- Corollary: If you love the smell of a grown tree, vs. manufactured, and you live for a nighttime twinkle, you’re going to be cursing light strings for the rest of your life. Make peace with them now. It’s quite possible that nobody will ever help out, and it’s not worth any of your lifelong grudge tokens.
- Buy timers for the outdoor lights. Your neighbors will thank you when those gorgeous extremely bright icicles on your garage turn off by 10 or 11pm and I promise you are going to forget to do it without automation
- What you cook is less important than that it’s ready as planned at 5pm. Hungry intoxicated people are often unpleasant.
- Corollary: Nobody needs Christmas china per se but there’s always fun in red plates or green napkins
- You aren’t running late unless you have to dash to the mall at 4pm on December 23rd. December 22nd is on time.
- Don’t try to create Christmas traditions all at once. Let them accrue organically; it will happen. Besides, if you fill your days with hot chocolate bombs and and caroling and so forth you may never stumble upon the tradition of shopping for stocking presents on December 24th at a large drugstore chain with your sister, the two of you laughing so hard your niece worries you’ll be escorted out.
- Corollary: By a security guard.
- Corollary #2: stocking presents, even for 12 people, CAN be wrapped close to midnight on Christmas Eve if your siblings help. Ask me how I know.
- Corollary #3: If you want matching stockings with embroidered names by all means do so but it does preclude somehow acquiring a lone stocking as big as a St. Bernard that makes everyone every year laugh so hard they cry.
- Laughing so hard you cry is a Christmas tradition all its own
- If everything is awful, don’t worry. There’s absolutely no guarantee that anything will be the same next year. If everything is lovely, enjoy it keenly for the same reason. Such is our knife edge.
P.S. if chaos and last-minuting makes you miserable, ignore everything I just said. This post is for we who live on this human cliff and there find joy.
I wish you a Merry (giddy/organized, your choice) Christmas. If it’s not your holiday, tell me when yours arrives and I’ll celebrate it here too. If you have other holiday life lessons, I’d love you to share. And have a wonderful weekend, in every mode.
29 Responses
I love this post! Yes, we’ve learned a few things along the way. . . And let go of most of the anxiety that “So, are you ready for Christmas?” might once have generated. . . (We always are, really, just by showing up, if only we’d known)
Frances, I love this so! We are ready for Christmas just by showing up. If only we’d known, which applies to much of women’s value…
Yes! (Except we don’t wrap stocking presents. Nor do we wrap presents that are supposed to be from Santa, they just get a bow and a tag.)
I would add Don’t try to do All The Things *every* year. This year I am skipping decorating gingerbread houses, although in the fallow period between Christmas and New Year’s maybe we will finally decorate the chcolate cookie Halloween mansion or gingerbread tukeys from Thanksgiving…
Also, if you love the smell but can’t go for the hassle of a real tree, a swag or wreath will do the trick.
Happy Holidays!
Renee, that’s so great. Decorating a Halloween house for Christmas. I mean, why the heck not! Might even be more delicious!
Maybe off topic a bit, but as I’ve gotten older it feels like the time between Thanksgiving and Hanukkah/Christmas has compressed…and I feel very “done” after Thanksgiving.
However, I feel more joy and ease if I’m organized and not last minute. But yes to all your great suggestions to those are who are beginning to host.
KSL, Since my kids go East, to their dad’s family, for Thanksgiving, the time feels large to me. But if I hosted big Thanksgivings? I bet I’d feel just as you do.
I will second/third/forth the point that what you cook isn’t as important as getting Children/Family/Friends into their seats and eating in a timely way. Everything will go better when the hostess can sit down, have a bite, and enjoy themselves.
My veteran points on holiday meals are:
If you’ve never made whatever you intend to serve before, don’t put it on the menu.
If you have guests or family member who won’t touch beef if it’s not medium rare – don’t serve beef. Nobody with more than a few guests needs the stress of getting rare meat onto the table along with everything else.
RoseAG, Rare meat is so tricky. But what about a roast? Keep it rare inside and everyone else takes the ends? Perhaps too complex, and the point is to reduce complexity;)
We didn’t have a Christmas rush when I was growing up because we were Muslim and partly Scottish so celebrated New Year instead . This has the advantage that the Christmas surplus food and early sales of everything else fill the shops on the 26th-30th Dec. Nowadays in my family we have the big meal on the Solstice since the returning daylight can be celebrated by all . I’m not sure what we will do for present-giving – New Year ? I’m only thinking about the goose at present since it is my turn to cook it….
Rukshana, It sounds as though your family really found your own calendar and traditions. And the Solstice is one of the few calendar moments that is culturally-neutral and therefore can probably absorb its own weight in meaning.
It gets done, when it gets done..,and if not, there’s next year. Today I had to pay extra for expedited shipping to get my Christmas cards in time (barely) to send out before Christmas….oh well. And if I can recycle gift bags and even gift tags (!) then I’m saving the environment, money and time (the tags are already filled out!). Yay!
Happy holidays to all !!!
Jane, I haven’t done Christmas cards in years. But absolutely we recycle gift bags and gift tags and everything possible. Christmas from OTHER people, however, I love. And cut up they make good gift cards themselves;)
Also, carefully removing ribbon and tape from beautifully wrapped gifts can make the joy last for years. My mom loved to make beautiful packages with attached tree ornaments, bells, twigs, or faux berries. My husband’s family used cheap paper that was torn and discarded immediately with a kind-of wrapping paper basketball game. To the point, I would carefully unwrap my mothers gifts, cut off the tape and refold the paper. Twenty years later I am finally squeezing out the last of the remnants of her paper for tiny gifts. It’s a connection that keeps her love of Christmas in mine. Carol in VT
Carol, this is beautiful. My stepmother is a gorgeous wrapper, and I have several of her ribbons and bows in my stationery drawer, ready for reuse and reuse.
When my children became adults, I asked them what their top five Christmas “musts” were — and made sure to include those, while letting other “traditions” go. To my surprise, “cheese grits” made both of their top five lists! We have a prelit faux tree (probably saved our marriage!), because we like to put it up right after Thanksgiving, but I buy fresh evergreens for decor and replace as necessary for that Christmas scent.
Tricia, what a brilliant idea to just ask. Just ask. And cheese grits;)
Love this post, Lisa! I think the biggest overarching thing I’ve learned about hosting holiday celebrations is It Doesn’t Have To Be Perfect.
Also:
You don’t have to find the “perfect” gift for everyone. (Especially those who aren’t family or close friends.) These days, a lot of folks are very happy with a box of nice candy and a gift card.
And:
If you don’t have a real tree and miss that evergreen smell, the Diptyque Sapin candle is fabulous!
Susan, It Doesn’t Have To Be Perfect. Because as we come to know, perfect gets broken as much as anything else:). A box of nice candy sounds pretty awesome to me:)
A security guard?
Shelley, I just meant we were being so boisterous the concern was that the CVS security guard might have to remove us. Sorry to alarm you!
Love this! Merry Christmas.
Mardel, thank you, and Merry Christmas to you!!!
1. It is as hard as you make it. Lighten up.
2. Family may not always bring ease and joy but friends do.
3. Make sure there is plenty and be open handed.
4. Let people help if they want but don’t worry if they don’t.
5. If you are not at home, leave your own rituals there as well. Enjoy those of others.
6. Don’t complain. It comes once a year so get with it.
Enjoy!!! And merry Christmas, one and all!
Annie, lovely. Thank you. And the reminder about friends holds here in the comment section of this blog too. xoxox
Lisa, I love how you approach this season. Christmas of 2019 was the Christmas after my 30 year marriage finally concluded its long slide into oblivion. My poor mother, who just a year before had had to face the fact of my father’s wild oats from before they got together, via an Ancestry DNA test I took as a lark (My sister is everything a sister should be and fully a member of the family now. But that is a story for another time.) Poor Mom , 81 at the time, looked at me and said, “I don’t think I can manage Christmas anymore.” And no great wonder. So, I pulled in my abs, stood up a little straighter and changed our Christmas completely. Still all the sparkle and family china and silver, but instead of the formal family dinner, I now throw a big ol’ party. “Come when you can, leave when you must” is my motto, for anyone who wants to stop by, both family and friends. Mom just sits in the corner of the sofa with her feet up, holds court, lets everyone feed her tender morsels from my buffet and refill her champagne flute. Just goes to show what beauty can happen when you repair broken things. Have the happiest of holidays. XX
Kristina, what an astonishing family rebirth. I love your motto, and what you write, “Just goes to show what beauty can happen when you repair broken things.” Words to Christmas by. Thank you, and such very happy holidays to you.
Christmas at our place is a mix of English, French and North American traditions.
I’m of French extraction so Christmas Eve is special, with a frenzied gift opening for the kids and Midnight Mass if the weather is good enough (we live up North). French Christmas carols are featured throughout the season.
My husband was born in England, so he decorates the tree while Handel’s Messiah is playing. It takes the full 2 hours to assemble the tree, place the bubble lights (a relic of his boyhood) and all the ornaments on the tree.
When my children were young, it was a crazy time for me to prepare Christmas dinner – one was a vegetarian, one only ate chicken (no beef) and the other only ate beef (no chicken), so I learned to do high temperature roasting at 500 degrees, so the 3 mains could be prepared quickly and be ready to put on the table all at the same time.
The only disadvantage was that the fat would occasionally burn. One year, smoke poured out of the oven, we couldn’t turn the fire alarm off, we had to open the doors and windows wide, and the neighbours came to enquire and ask if we wanted them to call the fire department!
I later overheard my son telling his (now) wife that “Mom is a really good cook, but you know the food is ready when you can smell the smoke”.
As to unstringing strands of lights from the tree. Remove all ornaments first. Find the leader on the string, start there. As you pull that string off the tree, quickly begin winding it around your open-fingered hand until you have a nice single-strand coil wrapped around your hand. From your collection of wired twists that you curse, but save anyway in that kitchen drawer, twist ONE around your coil. Done. Set your first twist-tied coil down, and be proud. Move on to the next string of lights, and do the same. Eventually you’ll have several nicely-coiled, well-behaved, twist-tied strands of lights ready to put away with your ornaments, and sooooo easy to unwind for next year’s tree. If you’ve just had it, the donations people and customers will appreciate your sense of organization.
So many good ideas.
If you’re the fire chief do not accidentally start such a big grease fire in the oven that the fire dept must be called.
Don’t ever do Ancestry whatever, even as a lark.
If you have no sense of smell (wasn’t born with it)
set a reminder on your phone to turn the oven on.
Otherwise you’re unlikely to notice that the turkey isn’t cooking, and as guests arrive they will ask why they can’t small the turkey cooking.
That would be because it isn’t.
If your spouse is the fire chief and it’s time to sit down for dinner, and the next town over radios for help, expect that your spouse and all the other adults will immediately leave the table and race over to help out.
You and the kids should eat the hot dinner.
When the adults come back they might be pretty subdued. If so, offer a drink and a hug. If they’re happy, do the same.
Reheat their dinner and be happy that they all came back.
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