She’s making a spreadsheet, checkin’ it twice (& it’s a White Christmas on the South Shore!)

December 24, 2024

I wrote this post December 23. Photos are from December 20 to the morning of December 24.

The meal planning spreadsheet is done. I squeaked that one in this year. I’ve never finished my planning this close to actual Christmas before. Part of the reason I could delay that planning is because we’re not having our actual Christmas dinner until December 29th, when we’ll all be together.

But the main reason I had to wait so long is because of the trifecta of 1) traveling to see Taylor Swift with Brienne in Toronto from November 21-23, 2) getting really sick when I came home from Toronto and being out-of-commission for a week, and 3) working on my final paper for my graduate degree as soon I could think again after being sick (though reading my draft calls into question how cognitively functional I really was).

That paper won’t be done till winter 2025 but I needed to make some headway on it before breaking for Christmas.

The bulk of Christmas planning and decorating couldn’t happen until December 15 and I’ve been going hard at it since then.

I am hosting 9 meals in the next 10 days. Mom and I went to Halifax Costco last Tuesday and got a lot of stuff. Damien’s doing the final pre-Christmas grocery trip as I type this.

(He just texted me about a cut of pork I need for roasting. “I can’t find this cut, will this other one work?” I suggested he talk to the butcher directly. Sure enough, the butcher had what we needed in the back and cut it up to order.)

Although I plan the meals I don’t do all the cooking and preparations. The divvying up of who is doing what and which Sanctuary household is responsible for which contributions is what the spreadsheet is for.

I’ve prepared a Christmas menu spreadsheet for years now because our holiday is extended, it’s more than 1 or 2 meals.

Historically, our Christmas gathering is 4 to 6 days long. Usually we’re all in one home because prior to this year we’ve not lived close to each other where you can drive home to sleep in your own bed after a family gathering.

Those years when we were 12 (my brother’s family, my family, my parents) we rented one large home to stay in and brought all our food and supplies to those places. That was another level of planning!

This year we all live at the Sanctuary. Thanks to my Dad’s incredible efforts this fall, with contributions from my brother and nephew, we have three homes to accommodate everyone.

We used to live thousands of kilometres away from each other and this year we’re mere metres away from one another. And now it’s our children that live 1,300 kilometres away.

We have three homes to accommodate all the cooking and comfortable sleeping and hanging out spaces, but I have the big dining table and big living area. (Thanks Mom & Dad.)

This year, Christmas dinner and five other shared family meals are at our house. Damien and I are also providing for/feeding our own crew on the non-shared supper nights. We top out at 11 people and our quietest night will be just four of us.

Our kids are arriving and departing at different times, with a three day stretch where we will all be together.

From the time we knew we were moving here I have been anticipating this first holiday together. Welcoming our kids to our family home. A home they didn’t grow up in but that has been Nana & Papa’s home for a good chunk of their childhood.

This is a place we’ve visited for years and that is already associated with holidays, vacations, loving and generous relationships, extended family visits (and some of the frustrations that come with that), and good food.

In hosting Christmas here, the first Christmas I’ve hosted in my own home for 10 years, I feel like I’ve finally arrived at the vision I had for myself as a middle-aged woman.

I have amazing role models in my now-deceased grandmas, 10 aunties, and most importantly and notably, my mom. I feel like I’m stepping into my birthright and the role and purpose I’ve always been meant to fulfill as a mother. When my kids were little we went my parents to make the Christmas holiday special.

And now here we are, preparing to have our kids come home to us.

This is a sense of full circle joy and satisfaction.

If that wasn’t enough, in these last days of Christmas preparations we've been given the gift of a white Christmas.

In all our years of coming to Nova Scotia for Christmas, very rarely has there been snow. One year it was 15C on Christmas day and the grandkids helped Papa stack wood.

This was part of the reason we choose to meet in Quebec for a handful of years and rented places nearer to our home in Montreal. In addition to having space for all of us to sleep, there was a higher likelihood of snow.

Coastal Nova Scotia is a more temperate climate than Quebec but the winter has also been warming. The long-time and way back Nova Scotians remember colder and snowier times. I don’t have those memories. I encounter the weather as a relative newcomer, relative because I have been visiting here for 17 years already.

I had been perfectly happy with the bare ground December we were having. And then the snow came and the temperature dropped.

And what a treat and feast for the senses these last few days have been. Enjoying Mom & Dad's annual neighbour's brunch, having a sauna and rolling in the snow (I've always wanted to do that!), sleeping on the living room floor by the fire (I have a fold-up mat for this exact purpose, I also pull it out to sleep under the full moon when the light shines through our front windows), appreciating the beauty of all the Christmas lights we've put up this year (the most lights we've ever done), identifying new birds at the feeder, walking in the winter wonderland of the back woods, and watching all this snow through our wall of windows.

The days are just packed with goodness, beauty, anticipation, and lots of preparations.