It Will Always Be Christmas
When the seasons of our lives turn over, what do you cling to and what must you be willing to let go?
“I don’t think I’m going to do an Advent calendar this year,” I told Lydia last November. She had stopped over after class as she often did before making her way back to her dorm room, lingering around the kitchen island with her laptop and piles of stuff. So many piles of stuff.
Inspired by friends and Pinterest, I began the Advent calendar tradition in 2012, pinning my Type A superpowers onto the chaos of Christmas with toddlers. With an Advent calendar, there was a day and a time for every activity, from preschool Christmas pageants to Dollar Store Christmas shopping. The Wells Christmas and the Davis Christmas and the Lingro Christmas and the Fugman Christmas each got a day, knocking out four slots from the start.
When they were little, our holiday activities revolved around drinking hot cocoa, dancing to Christmas music, and crayoning in Christmas coloring books.
As they grew, painting replaced coloring books, school band and choir concerts replaced dancing to Christmas music, and drinking hot cocoa turned into making Bananas Foster and Harry Potter-themed dinners. Christmas family gatherings dwindled as Great Aunts and Great Uncles started hosting their own extended family gatherings, opening up slots for A Christmas Carol at Playhouse Square and an annual trip to the Buckeye Express Train Diner in Bellville.
Each year I hung different variations of 24 holiday-oriented activities on the wall or window of our home, cutting out cardstock and construction paper shapes for each day, taping or hanging a month of mom-manufactured magic within easy reach of my family’s young hands.
In the long, intimate December of 2020, I filled a jar with slips of paper labeled with favorite Christmas films, and we took turns drawing movie names to occupy the long evenings. It was in that quiet season that we watched White Christmas for the first time, and now our family sings “Snow” in four-part harmony at random moments in our home.
But last year, Lydia turned 18. Elvis was a junior in high school, and Henry was an eighth grader. All three of my kids love Christmas, but they also have friends and jobs, gaming laptops and Instagram Reels.
I had girded my loins for the Season of Transition—daughter in college, sons following close on her heels—and said, “I don’t think I’m going to make an Advent calendar this year.”
“No! We have to do an Advent calendar!” Lydia protested, looking up at me in alarm from whatever funny 30-second video had last caught her attention.
“Okay, okay,” I said, “If you think it’s worth it. I guess Henry is still a kid.”
So I cut out green slips of construction paper and mapped out 24 days of activities, making space for winter walks, Brandon’s basketball broadcasts, and calendar conflicts.
I knew before December even began that this season would require open hands and bending.
Every day I saw my daughter head out the door with her boyfriend or high school friends home from college, I remembered all of the things I did when I was not in my parents’ house as a college student—vivid Christmas newness with my boyfriend’s family and running to and from my seasonal job at Borders—and struggled to recall a singular moment at home for the holidays. I know I was there for it, but home was too familiar to occupy more space in my brain all these years later. What we did we always did.
So there she went, missing Muppet Christmas Carol. Henry turned over the numbered calendar days each morning to find the Advent activity, waiting for the one that said we’d go ice skating, his shoulders drooping when it’d say something dumb, like “drink hot cocoa.”
“I’m waiting to go ice skating when Lydia’s around,” I told him. Come hell or high water, we would make that magic happen.
“We’re making Bananas Foster tonight,” I told Elvis before he headed to his job. “I’ll wait until you get home to light the rum on fire.”
When we came home from church on Christmas Eve last year, we opened our Christmas pajamas like we’ve done ever since the kids were in footie pajamas fighting bedtime at my in-laws’ house on Christmas Eve. Check that tradition off the list.
The Plan was to watch White Christmas. We had put off White Christmas all December, waiting until we could all watch it together. “Snow… snow… snow… snow! It won’t be long before we’ll all be there with snow…”
“I’m going to take these presents to Jameson’s,” Lydia said.
“I’m going to take a shower,” Elvis said.
“I’m going to go to sleep so I can get up early for cinnamon rolls,” Henry said (cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning another Wells family tradition).
Brandon sat down in the recliner and I sat down on the love seat, underneath a crocheted blanket in my new Christmas pjs. The dogs curled up on top of me. Brandon turned on White Christmas.
It was just us, just the two of us, after 18 Christmas of it being more than just the two of us.
Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye got on the train with the Haynes sisters.
“We should just go to bed,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”
I had made it all the way to Christmas Eve without weeping over all this change, all these necessary endings, all this growing up and going out and giving in. Out of 24 Advent activities, I think we did a quarter or less, and hardly any together.
It was the end, and I knew it. I had thought, of all the activities, surely we would end the season watching White Christmas. But we didn’t.
As I took down the opened slips of paper of our Advent calendar, I knew it was the last Advent calendar I’d make for our immediate family, the last leftover Scotch tape I’d peel off the sliding glass door on Berry Avenue.
I didn’t know last December that it would be the last December on Berry Avenue, the last December with the giant Christmas tree in the window, the last December baking enough kolackys, snickerdoodles, peanut butter blossoms, snowballs, and gingerbread cutouts to cover our handmade dining room table.
I have spent the last 19 years of my life creating and keeping family traditions, and now December is an empty calendar filled with possibility. My parents fly in on December 22. My in-laws arrive on Christmas Eve. Lydia will drive all day with her boyfriend and join us for dinner on Christmas Day.
When the seasons of our lives turn over, what do you cling to, what do you insist upon, and what must you be willing to let go?
There’s not a lot of room for “But we always…” anymore. We’ve never really always-ed anyway.
There were years before we made an Advent calendar.
There was a time when we had never once watched White Christmas.
There was a Christmas I spent with my mom and dad and brothers when it was just us and then there was every Christmas after, adding boyfriends and in-laws and babies until Christmas Present looked nothing like Christmases Past.
And yet it is still Christmas.
The week after we moved most of our stuff into our new home in Wilmington back in November, I opened the crates of Christmas decorations. I left a third of our ornaments with Lydia to decorate her own tree in her own place in Ohio, and yet there were more than enough bulbs and kitschy Christmas miscellany to drape around our 7-foot tree.
“Want to decorate the tree with me Saturday?” I asked Henry.
“I think we should wait until Elvis is here,” he replied. “He loves Christmas.”
Today I am haunted by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, envisioning tables empty and full, Christmas trees in different corners of different houses with a mix of same and different people, Christmas meals with dishes familiar and new, Christmas traditions I haven’t even dreamed of repeating yet in a new or same city.
It won’t be long before they’ll all be here, and then the house will be filled with their chatter and laughter, their presence and presents and piles of stuff. So many piles of stuff.
The Spirit whispers, It will never be the same, but it will always be Christmas.