why I love Christmas decorations
Every year, on the weekend after Thanksgiving, I get really excited and giddy to put up Christmas decorations. The Christmas season is a really nostalgic, sentimental time of the year for me.
I always assumed I love Christmas so much because I grew up with a Christmas-loving family. And definitely that's part of it, but this year I realized the other part of it: a lot of my decorations have a story behind them.
I have a Bigfoot ornament that I won at a trivia night in college with my friends a decade ago. I have ornaments, fake icicles, and strings of red beads from my grandma who I loved so much, who passed 5 years ago. She had that stuff way before I was even born, and it's in photos of me at her house for almost every Christmas before she passed. I have an ornament making fun of the pandemic from my step-grandma who just passed last January, she was always so supportive and loving. I have ornaments I've picked up from souvenir shops while vacationing with my best friends, which are my favorite trips of the year. I hang up my graduation tassels as ornaments, reminding me of my early days as a crazed teen and burnt out college grad. Even my Christmas tree was given to me from my step-grandparents, which they had for ~30 Christmases.
When I pulled this stuff out of boxes this year, it hit me. These aren't just random objects I bought at the store. Almost all of them have meaning. There's a story and a person attached to them. They're representations of the love in my life.
Of course there's the nostalgia of being a kid during Christmas, trying to stay up late to catch Santa eating the cookies I left on the fireplace mantle, going to my grandma's house and hearing old-timey Christmas music while stuffing homemade cookies in my face and opening all the presents.
And while I'll never fully recapture or recreate that exact magic I had as a kid, I can keep the spirit of it alive by carrying on those traditions and remembering the people in my life every year as I pull these items out of their dusty boxes.
This was the first year I rejected all the consumerism and capitalism that has now tainted the Christmas tradition in America, and it was the first year that I realized how meaningful my decor, memories, and relationships are. I don't think that's coincidental.
Merry Christmas,
beatrice the bard