Christmas without the gifts, without the hype
I promise, I'm not the Grinch-- my thoughts on having a slower holiday season.
It was Christmas Decorating Day, 2004. We put up the tree, which took all of 15 minutes; most of that time was spent climbing up and down the attic ladder. It was our Charlie Brown Christmas Tree, as we affectionately called it. It was short and scraggly, and I was honestly sometimes embarrassed by it when I would see the grand ceiling-high trees at friends’ houses. Thankfully, our ornaments were small or we wouldn’t have been able to fit them on, especially with a family our size.
There were the old felt ornaments handmade by Grandma Jo, a great-grandma I had never met, but knew to be the maker of these ornaments. Mom always reminded us to treat them with special care as our clumsy hands pulled things out of the Christmas bins.
How many bins were there? Five, six, ten? They would take over the living and dining room space as we unpacked many years worth of décor. We were always gifted a new ornament each year; I would hold that plastic green and red bell in my hand and marvel at how old it was, the ornament from my first Christmas in ’94.
On Decorating Day, we were all supposed to help Mom until the job was done. This included dusting, vacuuming, taking the bins down from the attic, deciding on the white lights or the colored and finding the broken bulbs. The year that comes to mind, is that one where my sister Amanda and I not only decorated the living room, but our older sister as well.
Our teenage sister was asleep on the floor instead of helping us, so naturally, we had to cover her with tinsel and take a picture (if you remember, back then you had to run to the other room and find the camera.) When she eventually woke up she didn’t find it as funny as we did. Christmas provided plenty of opportunities for annoying siblings. Nothing was Pinterest or Instagram-worthy, but then again, we didn’t have those images to compare to.
We had our own sort of traditions, though I didn’t see it at the time. We could expect to hear Mom and Dad stress over writing and sending the family newsletter. We could expect spritz cookie making and homemade fudge. Maybe it wasn’t every year, but I remember dividing up cookies and candies into metal tins to gift to neighbors. We must have had an entire bin full of those metal tins that I’m guessing we accumulated throughout the year.
Some years were better than others, gift-wise. Our parents would tell us what the budget was like that year for gifts, so that we knew what to expect. We’d pour over catalogs and circle our favorites in the 5 or 10 dollar range.
We lacked piles and piles of new plastic toys, but we made up for it in family movie nights with homemade treats. There was the mandatory watching of It’s a Wonderful Life with Dad (but it had to be the black-white version).
For us kids it was Home Alone at least twice per season, the original Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (even though we thought the characters looked creepy), A Charlie Brown Christmas, and The Grinch.
It was very important that we all got together for Christmas. We always hoped to see grandparents, maybe aunts, uncles, and cousins, but if extended family couldn’t gather, our own family still made for quite the full house. With five sisters, two brothers, and big siblings who started getting married when I was only six, holidays gatherings were never dull.
You could say I’m romanticizing the past, and maybe that’s exactly what I’m doing. Of course there were seasons of money stress, blizzards that prevented us from going out, family tensions, and puke buckets that accompanied present-time, but overall, the memories there are special.
When I look around (mainly online) and see families with matching pajamas, aesthetically pleasing homes complete with tall fresh cut trees, and professional photos for the annual Christmas card, I sometimes wonder if I’ve not done enough, not provided enough Christmas beauty and magic.
What used to be just letters and pictures with Santa, has now become pictures with The Grinch too. There are YouTube gift guides for every type of parent, Amazon links everywhere so you can think of the perfect gifts 24/7. There are endless decisions- will you buy online or support local business? Handmade from Etsy? Ethically sourced?
My husband and I decided years ago that we weren’t going to do much for Christmas. Some years we’ve had a tree, mainly because our friends owned a Christmas tree farm. Last year most of our decorations were snowflakes made from coffee filters that we taped to the walls. It kept a few of the kids busy on the coldest days.
I always try to bake cookies for friends, neighbors, or church events and make sure to have fresh cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning. Some years we have Christmas celebrations with extended family and some years we don’t. Nearly every day of December in my house you’ll hear traditional Christmas carols on repeat or Frank Sinatra. I try to remind myself to not worry about how other families are celebrating Christmas, or if I’m doing enough for the kids to make the right memories.
Here's where I feel like a major Christmas Rebel: I don’t go Christmas shopping. I do accumulate a few items for each kid here and there. Last year they each got a new set of pajamas (which I had gotten for free), a coloring or activity book, and an apple and orange in their stockings. There was some planning involved here, making sure I had enough fresh fruit purchased beforehand, as we eat through fruit like it’s going out of style. I almost forgot; a couple kids were gifted pocket-knifes. My husband knew they had lost theirs and picked them up at the store a few weeks before.
We love to get our kids toys, books, art supplies, ect. We just don’t feel like it has to be on Christmas and prefer to surprise them randomly throughout the year. Those few gifts last year all fit into the stockings, so I had them all “wrapped” in about ten minutes. This simple approach ended up being a huge blessing to me as I was pregnant and had messed up my lower back. I couldn’t walk around the house for about four days, and it turns out that chiropractors and massage therapists, both of whom I needed, are not available over the holidays.
I’m not saying that it’s bad to load up on gifts! But maybe you’re like me, a little nostalgic for “simpler times,” whatever that means. Perhaps it’s enough to remember Jesus’ birth, without all the Christmas hype, and without blowing the budget. Like my parent’s I’ve inherited a great desire to mail out a yearly newsletter but a wise woman in my life advised me to send it out in February when life is less busy. I took that advice to heart, and sent one out in April. No one was expecting that, and it was well received!
I hope you don’t read this as a formula for the holidays, but rather, encouragement to find what works for your family, and keep doing it.
Merry Christmas!
Catherine Pfenning
I love the encouragement to keep things simple. I have to keep reminding myself of this. A blessed Advent to you and yours!
Love it!