Countdown to Christmas 2025 … Day 2

As Russ and I drug the trees out of the basement storage and got them set up the other night, I looked across the top of one of the sections as we pulled it to its position and said, “Nine years. We have been here nine years, haven’t we?”

Yep. We have. 

Nine Christmases in this house that still feels so new to me. 

Caroline’s lifetime has filled the span of the time we moved in until now. She was a blip on a sonogram when we packed up our home of twenty plus years into a moving van, our car and truck, a borrowed Miller Lite van and set up this place the day before Christmas Eve. 

I had packed everything strategically so by the time our family rolled in on December 24th, we had beds, a kitchen, a little tree set up and gift bags that worked as stockings. I know it was God’s grace that helped me get everything organized and executed and the highest compliment was when all three kids said it felt like home and they couldn’t believe I had pulled it off. 

Even with all of that, I would not recommend a move just days before a major holiday but we get what we get and we don’t pitch a fit. 

This year I have to admit, I was having a bit of a hard time getting excited about pulling out the tubs and doing it all again. 

My own mom did a lot of decorating, but she wasn’t too keen on hanging ornaments. I loved it, which is good because our kids didn’t last super long hanging them either . Thus I have been the main ornament hanger in my life for six decades now, give or take a few years. 

And I felt tired this year. 

We get tired, don’t we? 

The shopping, cards, baking, meal planning, decorating inside and outside, parties to host and parties to attend, school programs, church events, wrapping on top of all the regular parts of life that take up a lot of our time every single day of every single week. 

And there is the tug to embrace the season of Advent with spiritual awareness and extra time to ponder devotions so that we don’t lose sight of the season. 

It happens every year that I swing back and forth between enjoying the festivities and having to talk myself into finishing the tasks that prepare our home and hearts for the celebration of Christ’s birth. 

Every year, I have to stop and ask myself why I am doing this or that thing. I have to pause and remind myself the reasons for each of the things I am thinking just have to be done. 

I can be thoroughly enjoying putzing around the house tucking sprigs of greenery here and there one minute and panicking the next that I will not get everything done. 

I don’t have a secret hack for helping anyone who struggles with the same mixture of emotions. 

For me, it is an endless dance between a lot of fun energy and a heavy dose of procrastination setting in. 

But for all the many years I have celebrated this season, I know that come Christmas Eve, it will all shake down and be fine. 

There will be family who made it sitting around a table with some kind of meal. There will be stockings and gifts enough for people who honestly don’t need another thing. 

There will be a candlelight Christmas Eve service in some church where I will hopefully be sitting next to my best friend/husband for another Silent Night, Holy Night. 

And it will be the best Christmas ever, again.