Closing Christmas

January 2, 2011

There are no photos in this post. I apologize in advance. Hundreds of sweet photos remain on my camera while my editing and exporting workflow sit unused on my home computer. It will be good to be home again (smile).

I am sitting beside a noisy, indoor pool in Syracuse, NY as I write this. We are on our way home from spending ten days with family to celebrate Christmas. I know what you’re thinking, “ten days?”.

Our closest family lives twelve driving hours away and we rarely see our siblings. Once a year at best, once every couple years more realistically. This Christmas season we had the opportunity to spend time with both Damien’s family and mine and we choose to make it work. But, not without a few sacrifices and some uncomfortable moments. What’s a family Christmas after all without those awkward “did that really just happen?” moments.

I hadn’t planned to share about this time (the good, the bad, the beautiful, the difficult) but I feel strongly the need to process and record a few things before I am able to move onto the new year and embrace all the exciting change, opportunities and amazing growth it has to offer. I am so pickin’ excited to start this new adventure called 2011, I can barely wait. I have few things I need to say first though. Words to wrap up this Christmas and this year.

I learned something about myself these past couple weeks. And I learned something about my family, as in the family I have created with my husband. And that is simply this - certain traditions, routines and Christmas festivities do matter to us. I learned a lot more than this about myself, but that is for another time.

This revelation, that we do have family traditions that matter, was surprisingly not apparent to me before this trip. If you would have asked me, as some of you have, “what Christmas traditions do you have?” I would have answered “oh, we’re fairly flexible but we usually open gifts on Christmas Eve.”

You see, for our whole family existence, the years that children have blessed our home with love and laughter we have spent every Christmas, except a couple, spending days in the homes of family, mostly our parents.That happens when you move hundreds and thousands of miles away from family but still wish to share important holidays.

Each year has been a bit different, depending on who we’re celebrating with, though the past three years have been in Nova Scotia with my folks. And so I assumed we didn’t have our own family Christmas traditions, needs and desires.

You know what? I was wrong. Maybe this is only apparent now that our children are growing older but we do have traditions and things that matter and unfortunately some of these revelations didn’t come out until too late. Like on New Year’s Eve when Celine broke down in tears about not doing stockings this year. Oh dear, I felt like a terrible mother for not knowing how important that was to her.

I spent all of December creating the experience I wanted with my children, stress-free. The kids and I baked a little, went caroling, made gifts, enjoyed seasonal stories and got together with friends. As a family we went to Christmas concerts and on the weekends we hiked, doing what we love - being physical in the beautiful outdoors.

Then we packed and I put aside all my expectations - I’ve learned from past experience that expectations can lead to disappointment at the holiday season. But I failed to take into consideration that for the last few years our children have had certain experiences that have formed their own expectations. Ouch.

And it’s not just my children. I have certain needs when spending multiple days away from home in the company of many. Something I am now willing to acknowledge about myself. My need for lots of natural beauty and time outdoors being two big ones.

We live and learn and we have a few months to work out the details before Christmas 2011. But now is not the time to make those plans because our family has some seriously big news to share with you very soon. Now that I’ve processed our trip I can actually move on to sharing that news... after we get home.

First though it’s time to get these kids out of the pool and share a movie in our hotel room, on this, the first day of a very exciting New Year.

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