Hurtling through the Holidays

...and my to-do list was spooling out in my head, all the million little things to do. The presents to buy, the meals to plan, the Christmas cards to send out, the house to clean in preparation for guests. But the usual urgency wasn’t there. I was nursing a cold on top of a cold, and then I gifted that to my husband, and we were both trudging around the house cradling our Kleenex boxes. 

We joked about not putting up the tree. I mean, why? In a few weeks we’d be taking it down. But then I don’t know what happened. We hauled the Christmas stuff up from the basement. We watched Diehard. (Yes, it is a Christmas movie.) We bought presents for the family we sponsor at our local community center. Both kids needed winter coats and it was killing me how cute the little coats were. I played the Charlie Brown Christmas music and set the pot on the stove with the orange peels and cinnamon sticks. 

This is one of the ideas in the Hygge book that my daughter gave me a few Christmases ago. Hygge is a Danish thing where, instead of fighting the winter season, you go All In on it. You can do this by either hunkering down cozily with blankets and books and warm beverages and fragrant scents wafting from a pot on the stove, or else, you can bundle up and go cross country skiing. Needless to say, I lean more toward the hunkering down option. 

I crossed Christmas cards off the to-do list. How I accomplished this task was I decided not to do it. I read a book. I listened to a podcast about the history of Santa. I lost myself for an hour, scrolling through pictures from Christmases past. Most of the Christmases past are a blur. I wasn’t a person who lived in the present. I was planning and whirling and out of breath. Sometimes I hid in the bathroom. 

After, I would remember with an ache in my heart all the lovely moments I’d only been half paying attention to. 

The years whirred by, but something nice: the lovely moments added up. I have thousands of them now that I can revisit whenever I want to. But what I want is to make more lovely moments. And I want to be there, fully present, for each one. 

Yesterday it snowed again, and all of the plans we had for the weekend flew out the window. We took a walk during the height of the storm. There’s a small, newly planted tree at the end of our street by the Starbucks. Last summer a truck plowed through and tore up the sidewalk. There were weeks of construction, but somehow the new sidewalk got torn up again, and the whole thing had to be redone. When it was finally finished, someone planted the small tree. 

It looks like the Charlie Brown Christmas tree, my husband said, when we clomped by it in the snow. We should decorate it. 

I laughed because I was thinking of the mysterious Yarn Bomber lady who lives in our neighborhood and sometimes, overnight, she will decorate a light pole with a colorful, knitted sleeve. 

What if there was a Christmas Bulb Bomber, I said.

What if it was us, my husband said. 

Why not? 

How you stay present is you stop thinking for a second and take the world in through your senses. Cold wet snow pelting your cheeks. Flakes on your tongue. The crunch of boots. The smell of coffee drifting out of the Starbucks drive thru window. 

Silver bulbs dangling on the branches of a tree.