The Unplanned Christmas

Fewer plans this holiday season has meant more memories...

This holiday season has felt different for me. It feels slower and quieter. But it also has been more fun. Something about the slower pace has freed us up to do more of what matters to us as a family. And the quiet has given us some true rest. Not sleep, but rest.

There are a few different reasons I can think of as to why this year has felt different.

1. I finished my Christmas shopping really early. I am usually a pretty early Christmas shopper, but somehow this year, I finished everything by December 1. I wasn’t trying to. It just kind of happened that way. I did 90% of my shopping this year on Black Friday and Small Business Monday. And that basically left stockings (which are a big deal in our family) and I finished those up a week or so later.

   

   

2. I set up my gift wrapping station in the middle of our house! Mommas of littles, you can’t do this yet. But because my kiddos are older now, I don’t have to be quite so stealth with presents. Which is good because every year, I set up gift wrapping in my bedroom and it takes me days and I get locked away from everyone and I get frustrated and hot (I always get hot when I’m frustrated - hello, perimenopause!). This year, I decided to set up my wrapping station on the dining room table, smack dab in the middle of our house! I would bring down a few gifts at a time, hidden away in nondescript Amazon boxes, and I could wrap while the family watched Christmas movies or football or whatever was going on. Consequently, I wrapped more frequently for smaller bursts of time and I really loved that. It didn’t feel so overwhelming and daunting.

   

   

3. I didn’t schedule anything. In fact, I actively tried to avoid scheduling anything. Instead, I kept our family’s list of favorite Christmas season activities and events in a list on my phone, and whenever I realized we had a free Friday or Saturday night or Sunday afternoon, we just picked something from the list to do. Amazingly, we still got all of our favorite activities done without a rigid calendar of events. With little planning, we were nimble and able to adjust as we felt like it without worrying about buying tickets ahead of time. If we were tired one night? No biggie. We’d just do whatever we were thinking about doing the next day. Or the next night. Or the next weekend. And some activities we decided to not do at all! I was a little sad when my family declared they were all too told for our visit to Celebration, Florida. We have gone to their Christmas celebration for years, but instead of forcing my family into having fun, dammit. I actually stopped and listened to them. Instead, we went to the Nutcracker!

   

4. I didn’t plan our winter break as a time to get anything important done. No big cleaning sprees, no house projects, no houseguests. We’ve had nothing important to do for a week now and we will continue to not have anything to do until January 6 when I go back to work. It is a three week staycation, and we are loving every minute of it. Our family has watched six seasons of The Holiday Baking Challenge on the Food Network (the fact that we have all found something we all like to watch at the same time is a Christmas miracle). We’ve baked cookies and delivered them to neighbors and friends. We have gone to the movies and watched movies at home. We’ve played cards and games and even have a Christmas puzzle on the dining room table now that my gift wrapping is done. I have really loved being able to focus on my family right now because as they get older, I’m very aware of how quickly the years go by.

   

   The holidays are always exciting in the best ways and I feel like as I get older, I get better and better at managing them. Probably because my kids are getting older. Whatever the reason, this season has been a really happy one for me. I hope it has been for you, too.