Accepting a different kind of festive

The house looks like it always does. There are mountains of clean laundry piled on chairs throughout the downstairs rooms waiting to be folded. Dishes in the sink that have yet to be stacked in the dishwasher. And there are bits of debris from snacks of toast and crackers strewn about the carpet like confetti that need to be vacuumed. 

It's a different kind of festive this year. 

The only things here that are reminiscent of a traditional winter holiday season are a garland of some variety of ever-plastic greenery and a sign wishing all who enter a Merry Christmas. Both of which have managed to lurk in their respective haunts perennially. 

The cards, ordered late, have arrived but haven't been processed for mailing. A single round of holiday baking has occurred, but my resolve to plan more has ebbed. 

Ordinarily, we would have a Christmas tree by now. Procured by the time the sun had set on Black Friday. The six-foot balsam would be shedding its needles all over the carpet while the dog and cats would be drinking out of its Christmas-flavored water receptacle. In addition to vacuuming up pine scent on the daily, I would be playing a never-ending game of picking up decorations from the floor and returning them to the low-hanging branches, from whence the cat had scattered them.  

I know it's just timing. What with the daughter off at college, not scheduled to return until just about the time Santa is supposed to be finalizing his lists; And the boy being in absolute solidarity for waiting. 

 But this new compression has also seemed to wring some of the joy from my holiday heart, leaving me with a complicated math of emptying the storage compartment of all our ancient ornament just in time to put them all away within a fortnight. 

Honestly, I wondered about this day. 

The first Christmas that slopes with me into middle age. 

The first Christmas that'll light has dimmed from childhood joy. Where there are fewer gifts to buy and cards to send. Fewer place settings at the table. And yet despite this winnowing, somehow, even the littlest thing will feel like a gargantuan chore.

I mean … I don't even know if those lazy snowflake light cannons work anymore let alone where in the garage they might have landed. 

I certainly would have noticed if I'd had to 

mow around them. 

Or at least I think I would.

This all rattles around in my brain as I sit amid friends during the coffee talk portion of our mid-week run.

Talk of miles and ailments has ended and the banter of baseball starts to wane. Christmas takes its place. The cost of a live tree is only a momentary complaint before postcards from our pasts start to sail around the table. 

Who among us hedged their bets at the tree farm by leaving a glove on a contender only to have misplaced the tree and the glove? Who was the earliest riser on Christmas morning and whose mom let them open just one present? What was the strangest tradition?

By the end of the hour, I had absorbed so many sweet secrets, that it felt as if I had been visited by the ghosts of my own Christmas’ - past, present, and future. 

And I felt more relaxed. I don't have to be ready, I just have to remember.