Yuletide

For the first time in our nine years, Loverboy and I decided not to travel for the holidays. Though I need not go into the obvious disappointments of missing large yuletide gatherings and the joy they bring, we were filled with glee at missing the travel crowd, starting January not disheveled and tired, and owning our own traditions. We [meaning I] almost broke into a cold sweat at the realization that all of the magic and spirit must come from us, the adults in the situation. The adults. But, like most simplification processes, we have been forced to evaluate what the season really means to us.

The kids and I have been making our own little gingerbread house and sprinkling powdered sugar to create a semblance of the snow that has been falling for days outside. Shivering while getting into his car seat to head to kindergarten one morning, my son said, "It must be colder than Russia right now!" (We had just seen The Nutcracker Ballet. We were thinking all things Russian.) No, I tell him, surely not. Pfft. And I look and, with us being at 5 degrees and Russia at 21, he was right.

We've decked the halls with a more traditional, homemade, English countryside kind of atmosphere. Tons of white lights. Wreaths hung in every window. The smell, the smell of the tree, oh. Pandora rolling through songs filled with history and spirit: Noel Nouvelet, The Feast of Stephen, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen (inspiration for the text on this little bookcase banner). Baby It's Cold Outside, especially Ann Margaret's rendition, which my little girl (2years) loves to breathlessly imitate.

Aside from our permanent tea/coffee station in the kitchen, we've set up the house even more for snacking and drinking while the snow flurries outside. For the first time, we have a working fireplace and I don't know which is better: my husband bemusedly watching me lay out a very fine fire, or the fire itself.

So far the best activity of all has been to simply be. The children sipping cider and playing a board game while I make fudge for teacher gifts, my husband running a hand over the beginnings of a beard (a sign that he isn't at work, a sign that he's in leisure mode) while getting to his Wallstreet Journal. The promise of more snow and the silence that balances the giggling and chatting and singing, the sounds of true yuletide joy.