My mom loved Christmas.
Like, White Christmas and It’s a Wonderful Life all year long loved Christmas.
Aside from loving those two movies, I did not inherit her level of love for Christmas.
I haven’t truly decorated for Christmas in probably a decade. I wouldn’t say I was Scrooge, exactly, but I was also nowhere near Buddy the Elf.
There were years I put up a tree because that’s what you do when you have kids. There were decorations that came out because they always came out. There were traditions we kept because they were traditions.
But there was very little magic in it for me.
At my most festive, I was tolerating Christmas.
At my least festive, we were dragging the real Christmas tree outside and lighting it on fire on Christmas Day immediately after opening presents.
😬
So there’s that.
Looking back, I think my lack of enthusiasm came from a lot of places. Some of them I understand now. Some of them probably had to do with drinking, and the exhaustion and anxiety that came with it. Some of them were just years when Christmas felt like another giant list of things a woman was supposed to make magical for everyone else.
But this year felt different.
For the first time in a very long time, I wanted Christmas.
A New House and a Very Old Christmas
We moved into Storybook Hill in October.
And suddenly I had this big old house that practically begged for greenery and lights and candles in the windows.
But I also had something else.
My mom’s Christmas decorations.
She died two days after we moved into this house, and in the strange sorting and dividing and carrying-home of someone’s life that follows a death, pieces of her Christmas came home with me.
Old decorations.
Things I’d seen in her houses for years.
Things I probably wouldn’t have picked out in a store myself, but that now felt completely different because they were hers.
Christmas decorations are funny that way.
A plastic Santa can be objectively ridiculous until you remember exactly where your mom put him every December for 30 years.
Then he’s priceless.
So I started decorating.
Not because I was supposed to.
Because I wanted to.
Starting Over, But Not From Scratch
Ironically, the year before we moved, I’d gotten rid of a ton of Christmas decorations.
Old stuff. Ratty stuff. Things I hadn’t used in years.
At the time, this was completely reasonable.
Then we bought a 6,000-square-foot house.
Excellent planning, Katy.
So I found myself needing Christmas decorations again, but I didn’t want to run out and fill Storybook Hill with random stuff just because there were empty surfaces.
I wanted to be intentional about what came back in.
Some things would be inherited.
Some things would carry memories.
And some things could become the beginning of traditions that didn’t exist yet.
Which is how I ended up buying myself a Christmas present.
The Christmas Pyramid
I’ve always loved German Christmas pyramids.
They’re the wooden decorations with little scenes inside and candles around the base. The heat from the candles rises and turns the fan at the top, which makes the figures inside slowly spin.
They’re completely unnecessary.
And completely delightful.
Exactly my kind of thing.
I found this one and immediately thought about my mom’s place up north.
The little wooden buildings. The trees. The people. The warm candlelight.
It felt like something that could have belonged to her.
Or maybe something she would have bought for me if she’d seen it.
I could practically hear her saying how much she loved it.
So I bought it.
For me.
And every time I lit the candles and watched those tiny wooden figures slowly circle around, I thought about her.
Not in the crushing way grief sometimes arrives.
In the warm way.
The she would have loved this way.
Those moments have become some of my favorites.
Maybe This Is What Traditions Actually Are
I used to think traditions were things you had to keep doing because you’d always done them.
Now I think maybe traditions are just things we decide are worth carrying forward.
Some are inherited.
Some get retired.
Some get lit on fire in the yard on Christmas Day. 😂
And some begin because you find a wooden Christmas pyramid that reminds you of your mom.
This year, I got to decide what Christmas looked like again.
I kept some of hers.
I bought a few things of my own.
I signed up to have Seasonal Porch Co. bring me porch pots because I have learned there are some things I am delighted to outsource. New season, new porch pots, zero effort from me. A perfect system.
And I let Storybook Hill become Christmas-y slowly.
It was a work in progress.
I suspect it always will be.
But maybe that’s what I loved most about it.
I wasn’t trying to recreate my mom’s Christmas.
I wasn’t trying to manufacture some perfect holiday for my family.
I was taking the pieces I loved from the Christmases that came before and mixing them with the life we’re building now.
Old decorations in a new house.
Her traditions and mine.
Memories and possibility.
And one completely unnecessary little wooden carousel turning slowly by candlelight.
Turns out, I didn’t hate Christmas.
I just needed to find my way back to it.
