It is a week and a half until Christmas. The atmosphere around stores and shopping areas is thick with anticipation and anxiety. At Costco the other night people were walking around with vacant, hollow expressions in there eyes as they mindlessly loaded packages of things into their carts. Multi-packs of utility knives and gloves and vitamins and candy and toys and movies and cinema tickets and stuff and stuff and stuff. Haggen, our local grocery store, has had Christmas candy out since thanksgiving day. There is Christmas music on the radio, trees in windows, lights on houses, and a growing collage of Christmas cards taped to a wall in the kitchen. All of the elements of the season that I look forward to are in place yet I feel strangely subdued this year.
I am looking forward to Christmas, I always do. For my six year old, this is the first year there has been a nearly unbearable anticipation as things have started to come together, a month of slow preparation has wired him to volatile tension. For my 20 month old, the anticipation is not there, he is happily oblivious to the plans, excited by the lights, but for him it is a day like the one before and everything is still a grand discovery to be made. He will be no less excited than his brother on Christmas morning. This year, I think, beyond all else, I am looking forward to the excitement of the boys. After all, we celebrate the incarnation of Christ, a gift to all, but the day, the season, is for children.
Perhaps this is the first year I've truly realized that, maybe I'm grieving just a little bit as I accept adulthood. Not that I won't enjoy it or that I don't look forward to Christmas morning, but the day itself has magic for children in a way it can not have for adults--adults whose minds are torn between giving in fully to celebration and always keeping half a thought on life in the world of tomorrow. The day after.
I remember, with vivid clarity, my dad going to work the day after Christmas. We would wake up and there was a dull emptiness that follows catharsis. My brothers and sister and I would go through our gifts stacked under the window that had been unloaded from the car in haste on our return from my grandparents house and my mom would be occupied with something that needed done around the house, the house having the air of Sunday about it and we all expected my dad to be around but he was at work.
Life rolls on as normal through the holiday season--breaking for thanksgiving, Christmas, and new year and picking up immediately where it left off. We are changed with each passing year, affected some how, because we approach Christmas different each year: older. But I can't help thinking it would be better to remain children lost in the anticipation of Christmas morning rather than adults weighed down with burdens of the world.
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