AND SO this is christmas... carol of the blues

How to treat Christmas when children are grown young adults at home? This is when I have really come to learn that patterns established when kids were young (oh, that was me setting those standards?) still come out and continue to run the show. As a family we didn’t “do” for others–didn’t visit shelters to serve food, make family donations to a charity, sing in a church, volunteer to help others at all, really. We shopped and bought presents and wrote lists of things to get and do.

And so the tradition continues. I was glad to listen to the classic carol “Silver Bells” celebrates us with the line, “As the shoppers rush home with their treasures.” Yet somehow the etched image in the 1950’s cityscape of the song seems endearing, evoking a smeary navy and silver scene, with bells off in the background. Now we have big box and miles of malls. It’s only stuff, even wrapped up in silver paper.

What a glorious day for me–the day after Christmas. We start to get our patterns back. No more searching for ways to celebrate, looking to find those now elusive things that “help make the season bright.” Now we can just go back to sweat pants, computers, and running out to see a movie. Maybe the thing to celebrate is pattern and habit... habitus, that we make and like. I know to a point of weakness I like repetitions: I’d take past years back to live through exactly as they were, all over again. But this is the sad, refractive stuff of New Years thinking, and that still ahead.

We’re still getting on with and over secular adult-style Christmas–our Habit Holidays of getting spending and returning! Yet it’s beginning to look a lot like post-Christmas. Maybe that’s a change to like.